In summer 1988, young BBC World Service reporter Christopher Gunness found himself at the centre of Myanmar's 'Students' Revolution – an event that brought Daw Aung San Suu Kyi onto the international stage. His main source was lawyer U Nay Min, the chief architect of the Revolution. When the protests were quashed by the military junta, Nay Min was incarcerated at the infamous Insein Jail while Gunness went on to professional success.

At the anniversary of the uprising decades later he manages to engineer a reunion meeting with a mysteriously reluctant Nay Min. Despite their former friendship this turns out to be a difficult and painful encounter, fraught with guilt and recrimination, where old wounds are reopened and long hidden secrets revealed.