During World War II, a group of young anti-fascists is sentenced to confinement on an island, where they work on the groundbreaking Ventotene Manifesto.
A young girl lives in the Outer Hebrides in a small village in the years just before WWI. Isolated and hard by the shore, her life takes a dramatic change when a terrible tragedy befalls her.
Will arrives for his last year at Military Academy, in the Deep South USA, in the 1960's. A black student, Pearce, has been accepted, for the first time and Will is asked to keep an eye out for the inevitable racism. The racists come in the form of The Ten, a secret group of the elite students. They want Pearce to leave on his own free will, but are prepared to torture him to make it 'his free will'. Will is forced to help Pearce and he is prepared to risk his own career to do so.
Adriano is a middle-aged man living in a dilapidated villa in Tuscany, when a group of young idealistic students arrives to restore the villa's vineyards.
At the end of the 1950s in Africo, a small village in the southern valley of Aspromonte, a woman dies in childbirth because a doctor fails to arrive on time. No road connects Africo with the other villages. In the wake of this tragedy, all of Africo’s citizens -including children - abandon their usual occupations and unite to build their own road. Giulia, the new schoolteacher, comes from the North with a mission to teach standard Italian to help bring cultural cohesion with Africo and the rest of Italy. But she will have to contend with the local mafioso Don Totó, who is determined to ensure this the town remains cut off, and thus, under his power.