The story of three women searching for more potent, meaningful lives. Each is alive at a different time and place, all are linked by their yearnings and their fears. Their stories intertwine, and finally come together in a surprising, transcendent moment of shared recognition.

In 1971 Salford fish-and-chip shop owner George Khan expects his family to follow his strict Pakistani Muslim ways. But his children, with an English mother and having been born and brought up in Britain, increasingly see themselves as British and start to reject their father's rules on dress, food, religion, and living in general.

Members of a Yorkshire branch of the Women's Institute cause controversy when they pose nude for a charity calendar.

Harold Fry is an unremarkable man who has made mistakes with all the important things: being a husband, a father and a friend. And now, well into his 60s, he is content to fade quietly into the background of life. Until, one day – Harold learns his old friend Queenie is dying. Harold leaves home, walking to his post office to send her a letter. And out of the blue, Harold decides to keep walking, all the way to her hospice, 450 miles away.

Have you ever wondered what happens with your pet when you are not at home? A dog worried about its future, a lazy parrot and an aquarium full of fish with strong religious beliefs, show us what really happens, since they share an uncertain future with the old age of its owner.

Jack, Steve and Goat are East-End Spivs. They spend their time wheeling and dealing wherever and whenever they can. It's not until Jack and the others get involved with a guy called Villa, and they are landed with a big payday they have been waiting for, when they realise what a mess they are into. At the back of the lorry they have smuggled goods in, they find illegal immigrants. Most of them escape but they are left with 2 kids; a boy and a girl, and have to decide what to do with them... Are they going to look after them and feed them, clothe them, love them, etc. or are they going to leave them on the streets of East-End London?

Salford, North of England, 1976. The now much diminished, but still dysfunctional, Khan family continues to struggle for survival. Sajid, the youngest Khan is deep in pubescent crisis under heavy assault both from his father's tyrannical insistence on Pakistani tradition, and from the fierce bullies in the schoolyard. So, in a last, desperate attempt to 'sort him out', his father decides to pack him off to Mrs Khan No 1 and family in the Punjab, the wife and daughters he had abandoned 35 years earlier.

Charles Price may have grown up with his father in the family shoe business in Northampton, central England, but he never thought that he would take his father's place. Charles has a chance encounter with the flamboyant drag queen cabaret singer Lola and everything changes.

Out of work, scrounger Robert Martin lives with his dysfunctional family - long suffering wife accident prone son and pregnant teenage daughter in a shabby house next door to a giant shopping center in the London suburbs. The Martins are the family from hell! Robert dreams if winning a dream holiday for his family, and when he fails to win yet another competition he flips, out tracks down the elderly winners, ties them up in the cellar and steals their tickets!

In the emptiness of the Lincolnshire fens, rural teenager Donna feels trapped in a joyless life with a domineering father and a dull job at the food factory. She grasps at the illusion of affection offered by a passing stranger - and must then cope in lonely terror with pregnancy.