Fifteen Dogs

When Stella, a young Métis mother, looks out her window one evening and spots someone in trouble she calls the police to alert them to a possible crime. In a series of shifting narratives, people who are connected, both directly and indirectly, with the victim — police, family, and friends — tell their personal stories leading up to that fateful night.

Days after being dumped by her boyfriend Marc in Paris, Hattie hears her sister Min has been checked into a psychiatric hospital, and finds herself flying back to Winnipeg to take care of Thebes and Logan, her niece and nephew. Not knowing what else to do, she loads the kids into the van and sets out to find the children's long-lost father, Cherkis.

In the 1970s in Northern California a father and his teenage daughters, Anna and Claire, work their farm with the help of Coop, an enigmatic young man who makes his home with them. Theirs is a makeshift family, until it is shattered by an incident of violence that sets fire to the rest of their lives.

Bernard Valcourt is a jaded foreign journalist in Rwanda, but his closest attention is devoted to Gentille, a hotel waitress with the slender, elegant build of a Tutsi. As they slip into an intense, improbable affair, the delicately balanced world around them–already devastated by AIDS–erupts in a Hutu-led genocide against the Tutsi people.

Ashley Rosco works as a bouncer at a nightclub in a small town, spending his off-hours training as a bodybuilder. He occasionally acts as muscle for his best friend, Darren, a small-time drug dealer. Darren’s girlfriend has had her own problems with drugs. When Chass disappears Ash can’t shake the feeling that something has gone terribly wrong.

Outwardly, Hannah Friesen appears to have a wonderful life.One would expect her to be happy-but she is far from that. What shows outwardly masks an inner personal turmoil. Hannah puts herself on a path to discover what is driving her increasingly destructive behaviour and finds out that what she thought she knew and who she thought she was, couldn't be farther from the truth.