The true story of a 1920s Canadian jazz band who play their every performance gagged and almost completely immobilized by thick cords which bind them hand and foot. The music they produce - from a full range of instruments, yet without recourse to the usual limbs and orifices - is a moving triumph of courage over self-imposed adversity.

At the height of the October Revolution during the 1919 allied intervention in Arkhangelsk, the exploits of one-legged Canadian soldier Lt. John Boles are told, after he is taken in from the cold by a dysfunctional Russian family and mistakes a local woman for his presumed dead lover.

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.