In the antebellum United States, Solomon Northup, a free black man from upstate New York, is abducted and sold into slavery.
A man's carefully cultivated private life is disrupted when his sister arrives for an indefinite stay.
Irish republican Bobby Sands leads the inmates of a Northern Irish prison in a hunger strike.
Set in contemporary Chicago, amid a time of turmoil, four women with nothing in common except a debt left behind by their dead husbands' criminal activities, take fate into their own hands, and conspire to forge a future on their own terms.