A woman celebrates her daughter’s sixth birthday by volunteering at the women's center. As she assists other women, she recalls her own trauma and struggles with the constant reminders of it.

A teacher at an all girls school thinks about her abusive partner while she is living away from him. She is thrown a birthday celebration at the school and becomes overwhelmed with emotion.

Ignoring numerous warnings from others, a mother promises her eleven-year-old daughter that she can have a slumber party for her birthday, which proves to be a little more hectic than she can handle.

On his thirteenth birthday, a boy on the edge of puberty climbs the high dive at the public pool for the first time. At the top, he feels as if he can stop time and see the entire world laid out before him — but eventually he must jump.

On the night of his daughter's birthday, a middle-aged Canadian professor laments the death of his daughter's mother, who died in childbirth twenty years ago.

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.

While preparing his mother's birthday present, a young boy realizes he has lost her special pruning knife and laments that he has ruined her day.