At a North American winter resort, an arthritic old man challenges a pair of young men to a series of physical challenges to prove that, despite his age and illness, he is still strong.

Days after announcing an invention that will change the fabric of his futuristic world, an inventor goes missing and two detectives must find out where he is and what his supposedly groundbreaking invention was.

When the 1979 June 4th Revolution in Ghana spreads across the country, the people of a small town quickly change from hopeful to fearful as life becomes violent. To cope, they must turn to the most powerful presence in their lives.

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.