Back in the 'bad old days' when the physically and mentally disabled were locked away in institutions a legend grew of someone who could stand up to the authorities and help them. This charming story is how a group of disabled people went to chase that legend. To assist them John is forced to come to terms with his daughter and her friends.
A young boy's innocent observations leads the local priest to believe he has borne witness to a manifestation of the Virgin Mary. Set in an idyllic rural Northern Ireland in the 1950's.
In Moscow, veterans of the Afghanistan war live on the margin. Their leader is Andrei, their former sergeant, blind from drinking wood alcohol there, and attended in a wheelchair by his younger sister, Lena. Andrei and his pals have a black-market stall, paying off both the city's Mafia (Oblov comes by regularly to collect) and the cops. The cops are looking for a subway slasher; Andrei is in love with Oriolo, a stylish African; unbeknownst to Andrei, Oriolo is saving to leave for Paris; and, Lena wants to protect her brother. When new cops trash their stall, Andrei ...
Brian Jessel, a civil servant in the Cabinet Office, is asked to investigate the mysterious death of the civil servant Stephen Summerchild twenty years earlier. Summerchild was working on a Cabinet project, under the Oxford philosophy don Elizabeth Serafin, to find the "quality of life" in Britain. Jessel finds a box of audio tapes from the project containing all the discussions up to the time Summerchild fell off the Admiralty Building.