A Native American man in Arizona is abandoned by his family on account of his alcoholism, leaving him to work with a local White ranch owner on the condition that he remain sober. Over the course of a year working there, he remains sober, and his wife considers moving back with their son, but his old friends and old habits return to tempt him towards addiction.

In the mid-twentieth-century South, a black mother's greed has haunting consequences for her and her coveted son.

An older man recounts how White settlers violently removed him from his home and took him to a boys ranch to strip him of his indigeneity.

A man in Harlem must traverse perilous waters as he attempts to dually support his brother's career in jazz and help him cope with the pain that led him to a heroin overdose in the past.

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.

Searching for her closest companion from the Iraq War, a soldier ventures into a rural town in Vermont, hoping to find him alive. When she discovers him, he is alive, but suffering a fate worse than death.

In 20th century Russia, a Korean-Russian mechanic's childhood best friend suddenly returns to their hometown. Their unexpected reunion stirs memories from their families' intertwined past and forces the mechanic to confront the disappearance of his Russian mother.