Alma is a young girl with emotional problems and a special relationship with her grandfather Ramón, an old country man who stopped talking about 12 years ago after his son, Alma’s father, sold a 2000-years-old olive tree in order to open a restaurant. Dominated by the sadness and the melancholia by the loss of his most beloved tree, Ramon spends his days visiting the place where the olive tree was planted, hoping the day the tree returns. Unable to bear the situation any longer, Alma looking for the olive tree, discovering that it was acquired by a Germany’s energy company located in Dusseldorf. Without money or resources, Alma convinces her uncle Alcachofa and her friend Rafa (who has a love interest for her) to go in a truck from Spain to Germany to recover the tree, starting a travel with unexpected consequences for everyone…

The film transplants the action from Russia to the English north east of the 19th century. Pugh plays Katherine, a beautiful young woman who has been married off to Alexander, the morose and sexually inadequate son of a wealthy mine owner, Boris. It is Boris who rules the roost and gloweringly insists on Katherine being a demure and submissive wife. As for Alexander, his face is not even revealed to us until the unwatchable catastrophic wedding night: he is essentially weak, bullied and victimized by his monstrous father. When she embarks on a passionate affair with a young worker on her husband’s estate, a force is unleashed inside her, so powerful that she will stop at nothing to get what she wants.

In 1961, mathematician Katherine Goble works as a “computer” in the segregated West Area Computers division of Langley Research Center. Following a successful Russian satellite launch, pressure to send American astronauts into space increases. White supervisor Vivian Mitchell assigns Katherine to assist the Space Task Group of Al Harrison due to her skills in analytic geometry. She becomes the first coloured woman in the team – and in the building, which has no bathrooms for coloured people. Katherine’s struggles to win respect from her colleagues and boss.