Family portrait

1953, Elizabeth II is crowned. The English community in Hong Kong gathers to celebrate the event. For Joy, it's just another boring get-together, like so many others. But her life will be transformed that very night when she meets young naval officer Edward Ballantyne. The impulsive marriage proposal after a brief encounter seems to be the answer to all of Joy's desires.

More than forty years later, Joy and Edward live in Ireland, and their relationship with their daughter Kate and sixteen-year-old granddaughter Sabine is distant and cold. In London, Kate is trying to resolve another of her many romantic crises and, in an attempt to protect Sabine, decides to send her to spend some holidays with her grandparents.

To everyone's surprise, Sabine seems to adapt well to country life and her grandmother's difficult temperament. Until Edward's sudden worsening health forces Kate to an unexpected return to the family home, reopening the old wounds that separate her from Joy. What secrets separate mother and daughter? Can Sabine unite two such different generations, or will she also fall into the silence that divides them?