A portmanteau film is a film consisting of several unrelated, or mostly unrelated, short films. Often each one is directed by a different director. Sometimes there is a theme, such as a place (e.g. New York Stories), a person (e.g. Four Rooms), or a thing (e.g. Twenty Bucks), that is present in each story and serves to bind them together. Sometimes there is one "top-level" story, which leads into the various "sub-stories", as in Dead of Night and The Illustrated Man . Another variation is when different sub-narratives share a common incident (usually a turning point), as in Amores perros.
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