Victoria is a republican widow who enters in the prison of Saturrarán (Vizcaya), place where an experiment of the Franco regime takes part: the separation of children from their mothers to give them up for adoption to families close to the regime, in order to break the chains of communism.

Juan Martin, a young boy from San Sebastian, decides to spend the summer in a remote hillside farmhouse to improve his Basque. But there he discovers that the language they use has little in common with his classroom learnings.