Jeff Solylo

While their mother is dying in the modern Gimli, Manitoba hospital, two young children are told an important tale by their Icelandic grandmother about Einar the lonely, his friend Gunnar, and the angelic Snjofrieder in a Gimli of old.

The mountain-village passions of a German widow and her sons unfold in the style of a 1920s expressionist movie.

At the height of the October Revolution during the 1919 allied intervention in Arkhangelsk, the exploits of one-legged Canadian soldier Lt. John Boles are told, after he is taken in from the cold by a dysfunctional Russian family and mistakes a local woman for his presumed dead lover.

Villosh is a small-time Russian gambler hiding from the KGB in a dreary perogie factory in Winnipeg. He dreams of rolling the dice in Atlantic City - but he needs a lot of money to make the move. So he concocts a scheme to kidnap a Finnish hockey star that steadily goes awry.