Madrid, Spain. On Monday, December 22, 1947, Charles Vidor's Gilda, starring Rita Hayworth and Glenn Ford, premieres. That same week, as every first Friday of the month, Hauma organizes a peculiar card game in an old tavern.
In the mid-19th century, California, a Mexican territory, became part of the United States. Faced with the possibility of being dispossessed of his land by the new authorities, Don César de Echagüe, a Spanish nobleman, asks his son César, a capricious and insufferable fop, for help.
Walter Mann is an actor who can make his life's dream come true: to star in his own play. However, the big moment that is about to arrive is interrupted by an internal struggle that will destabilize him emotionally.
Two children, Ignacio and Enrique, know love, the movies and fear in a religious school at the beginning of the 1960s. Father Manolo, director of the school and its professor of literature, is witness to and part of these discoveries. The three are followed through the next few decades, their reunion marking life and death.
David Carr is a British Communist who is unemployed. In 1936, when the Spanish Civil War begins, he decides to fight for the Republican side, a coalition of liberals, communists and anarchists, so he joins the POUM militia and witnesses firsthand the betrayal of the Spanish revolution by Stalin's followers and Moscow's orders.