Where do all the absent fathers go? For nine-year-old Cherry Laurel, they go to Fatherland, an island somewhere in Michigan, just like our world but for lost fathers.

Father Lands is the intricately woven story of two Midwestern families whose fathers might have gone to just such a place. The film traces the lives of the Laurels and the Tuckles and the legacy that links them.

Milwaukee, 1976. In one of America’s most racially segregated cities, the School Board is about to integrate its public school system. Thirty-four year old Bell Laurel, hospital psychiatric unit administrator, is determined, in remembrance of her civil rights activist father Nathaniel Fargensen, to make history by volunteering two of her three white daughters, Cherry and Ivy, to be bussed across town. But her botanist husband Jackson isn’t so sure it’s a good idea. He has long felt shadowed by the looming presence of Bell’s father in the old family house. 

On the other side of town, in a duplex near Cherry and Ivy’s new school, lives young, single mother Macy Tuckle with her nine-year-old son Hugo. Hugo’s father Ernie, a history professor, left them five years ago and Macy has been raising Hugo alone ever since, working in a hospital dishroom. She is determined, despite Ernie’s absence and her insecurities about her own poor education, that Hugo makes the most of his schooling, but quietly wonders whether she should have bussed her son to the suburbs in order to secure a better education for him.

Determined to save Hugo from both a powerless future and the ghosts of the past, she educates herself at night. But Hugo just wants his father back.

Cherry is drawn to the solitary Hugo at school. Their teacher, the exuberant Mrs Joy, is determined that all the children should be friends, white, black, blue or green. But while these two different worlds are colliding, Bell’s own marriage is falling apart as she and Jackson struggle to cope with the catastrophe of domestic life. Bell’s obsession with Integration and her father’s legacy is pushing Jackson further and further away. When he leaves her on Halloween, Bell suddenly finds herself a single mother.

As the year passes, Hugo and Cherry become allies across the color divide while their family life crumbles around them. Mrs Joy sets the children the task of finding out about their family history. Cherry and Hugo each go in search of their own ‘roots’, only to discover that the truth of the past is most elusive.

With Jackson gone, the foundations of Bell’s life are cracking and she is not coping with the aftermath. Haunted by her father’s suicide when she was seven, she too goes in search of the truth of the past.  Her search will take her across town to find Clarence, the black man Nathanial tried to help in 1949, and what she discovers will trigger a sequence of events that will profoundly affect both families.

From a father who leaps from a building, to a father who runs, and the father who returns, lies the bittersweet story of two families, one black and one white. Trapped for decades by their history, this year, across four seasons, they are discovering in themselves what it takes to move forward,

what it means to be bound and what it is to be finally free.