The story of the film centers on Irene Kawai, a Japanese American teenager in Chicago in the 1970s who is haunted by a photo of her grandfather she never knew standing by a barracks in a World War II internment camp for Japanese Americans.

In this moving and original reflection on mortality and transformation, Rea Tajiri partners with her mother, Rose Tajiri Noda, to create a film about the final sixteen years of her life as a person living with dementia. Tajiri shows us how to enter the world of a person living with dementia in order to connect through listening, art, and music

The first half of the film, co-directed with Nicolas van Hemelryck, is effectively a lengthy flashback about the history of Val, who left England at 23 for Colombia to be with her Colombian partner. Her life since then has involved two more relationships, four children by two different fathers, unhappy periods in England, experiments in communal living and lots and lots of traveling. Val values freedom above all things: “Your life is your life,” she passionately tells us, and the idea that a woman might have to sacrifice herself for her kids is hateful to her. She wants a full life, free from routine. On paper it sounds great, but perhaps not so much if you happen to be, say, her daughter.