During her conversations with her mother, a daughter often muses about the past, both politically and personally. She discovers more about her mother but also about the world around her as she observes life and its souvenirs.

Four women–a retired dancer enacting an old dance, a grandmother preparing a birthday dinner for her family, her granddaughter participating in a genetics study, and a researcher quantifying the burden of old memories–all unite under the combined weight of their war-burdened pasts in the contemporary United States.

A man looks back on his father-in-law's life after he passes away, thinking of the many jobs he held and his military service.

A chance encounter with an old ex-girlfriend causes a man to remember his past relationship with her and with his cousin, who immigrated from Korea to America to live with his family as a small child. Though she died in a motorcycle accident years ago, when his ex-girlfriend asks how she's doing he lies, creating the life she never had in his imagination.

A man reflects on the past week while an unexpected storm rages outside, and he compares the events that follow with the fall of the Roman Empire.

A Polish immigrant feels her mind slipping away, as her surroundings and even her own body seem unfamiliar. After she's diagnosed with Alzheimers, she reflects on the importance of her memories and her past.

On the brink of death, an elderly man recounts his life to his great grandson, revealing that his mother's schizophrenic delusions of an otherworldly fantasy land were no delusions at all.

After spending his adult life under the shadow of his father, a former NSA whistleblower, a man comes to terms with his complicated family history and what he wants for his own future.

When a mother's memory begins to deteriorate, her daughter catalogs her memories, both the ones she does and doesn't remember.

A man recalls his intimate friendship with his former English professor, who resolved to fuel his unsatisfied desire for playwriting during the time they were apart. In their reunion decades later, instead of the brilliant play he promised, the professor shows his former student a disturbing product of his mental instability.