As a war rages in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, a little girl becomes enthralled by the Charles Dickens novel Great Expectations. The island of Bougainville was torn apart in 1991 by a conflict in the South Pacific over a copper mine. The reclusive "Popeye" (Hugh Laurie) gives Charles Dickens' Great Expectations as an escape to the kids in fourteen-year-old Matilda's little town. However, fiction can have harmful repercussions on a war-torn island.