The story of the Avro Arrow, the world's fastest fighter plane built in 1950's Canada, and how the project was dropped due to political pressure from the United States.

This Canadian film presents and old-fashioned war time romance. It is set during 1942 in Manitoba and traces the doomed affair between a young farmer's wife (Christianne Hirt) whose husband is fighting abroad and a dashing Australian pilot (Russell Crowe). The pilot has come to train in the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan of Canada. When the pilot, Lachlan, is not training, he is surreptitiously wooing Lill, the farmer's wife. At the other end of town, Betsy (Wanda Cannon) who supports her two kids by bootlegging, charges for her services. She gets involved with Zeek (Scott Kraft), an American flight instructor.

While their mother is dying in the modern Gimli, Manitoba hospital, two young children are told an important tale by their Icelandic grandmother about Einar the lonely, his friend Gunnar, and the angelic Snjofrieder in a Gimli of old.