Matthew, a young medical student from
Toronto,
Ontario, returns to his birthplace in
Guyana on receiving a letter from his mother three months after her death. Prompted by his surroundings to sort through the idealized memories of his childhood, Matthew reaches the horrifying realization that he has returned to a world which he was never a part of. Contemporary
Guyanese reality highlights the white
colonialist privilege his family had enjoyed. Retroactively homeless and nostalgically orphaned, he throws himself into his work at an underfunded and under equipped
Georgetown hospital, developing a fatherly devotion to Dexter, a young orphaned boy housed at the local orphanage. Matthew spends endless nights with a ghostly old Hungarian woman who stumbles about the hallways of his hotel, spying on him with longing. She offers Matthew the comfort he has been seeking in the memories of his mother, seducing him with cigarettes and warm rum, and terrifying stories of being captured and raped by soldiers of the
Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Slowly, even these marginal connections to reality disintegrated, and Matthew finds himself utterly alone. ==Cast==