Willy Echevarria is a policeman in a small town in the Dominican Republic. He's also a fan of and yearns to be like the leads of classic Film Noir. After being fired in a bumbled operation with his bad cop partner Bruce Garcia, Willy has a chance to restore his career by finding a historical artifact that mysteriously went missing from a national museum.
In 1937, near the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, a young Haitian woman named Marie is expecting her first child with Frank, her doting Dominican husband. After her mother's burial, she is awakened in the middle of the night by distant screams. The immediate execution of all Haitians on Dominican soil has been ordered — the so-called “Cut” — and what seals a victim’s fate is whether or not they can pronounce "perejil" (parsley). Marie takes off to find Frank in the next town over, with nothing but the clothes on her back.
A lonely man who operates a film projector finds his only solace in a woman he sees on a film reel. After the reel is lost in an accident, he sets out to find the woman through the remotest, poorest places of the Dominican Republic.
Back home, Leila was involved in a mysterious car accident that her mind has blocked from her memory. Now it's Summer, and Leila escapes on a Roman Holiday to tend to her wounds in the arms of her sister, Anna. But the two sisters can't connect and if Leila's going to recover she'll have to take the first steps alone
