St Pierre is a cold, wet and very remote island where you have to make your own entertainment.
Two drunks kill a fat man for fun, and are sentenced to death by guillotine. Unfortunately, there is no "widow" (a colloquial term for the guillotine in French colonies) on St Pierre. So the authorities send off for a second-hand one from another colony.
Death row for the killer Neel (Auteuil) is brightened by "Madame" (Binoche) and her schemes to make St Pierre slightly more habitable, when she co-opts him to build a glasshouse, amongst other tasks.

When the Brits pulled out of India in 1947 they cut a slice off the north-western corner and created the independent state of Pakistan: the idea was that Muslims could have control of the new country, Hindus could have control of the old country, and everyone would be more or less satisfied. Less, as it turned out. Eleven million people on either side of the new border had to leave their homes, hundreds of thousands were killed, and India and Pakistan have been close to war, when not actually at war, ever since. "If you ask anybody from the Punjab today," says director Deepa Mehta, "(...) what does 1947 mean to you, they will never say the independence of India. They all say the partition of India. Every family member has some horror story to tell." Earth tells the story of the partition from the perspective of a young girl from the soon-to-be-Pakistani town of Lahore not so much the main character as someone who lends us her eyes so we can watch what happen to her family and her family's friends when Lahore is torn in half. It's a touching story, accessible without being overly simple.