In the far future, a Welsh woman temporarily moves to a space colony on a distant planet with her husband, Owen. The woman regals her space-born daughter with tales of the wonders of Earth, and her daughter develops a great longing for Earth that eventually puts her life at risk.

While visiting a Jewish colony in Argentina, a man gives a lecture as part of an effort to revive Yiddish culture in the settlement. Afterward, he hears from locals the unexpectedly unrighteous history of life in the colony.

Tired of being deceived and humiliated by people that he trusted, a Swedish-American man decides to leave civilization behind and live alone on an island forever. However, his paradise quickly turns into hell, and he is forced to realize that history always repeats itself.

A young Native American man visits a burial site on a nearby island and must reflect on both his allegiance to his culture and to himself.

When a shipbreaker travels to an African island to shut down a shipyard owned by his employer, he meets an ex-Corporate America worker who pushes him to reconsider.

As life on Earth crumbles around her, one woman attempts to save the last survivors of a failed Mars colony.

A woman leaves her island home to serve at a créche on the mainland in a poor area of the city. There, she falls in love with one of the children she cares for and wants him as her own, but his mother commits a crime that puts the boy out of reach.

A Canadian woman lets an American exile room at her house, but warns him that he can only stay for two days.

In Ceylon, colonized by the British, an Indian Tamil woman describes the events that follow the departure of the British from the plantations. She imagines the possibility of a new world as the Indians reclaim their land. However, the reality that follows shows how the British values persist and are upheld by ethnic differences between the Indians on the plantation.

Desperate to feel some sense of human connection, an old man begins to look into the secrets of the land he owns and the people who lived there before him.