Two stories intertwined around one image (a silvery sardine), Silverfish explores confinement, community and travel. The first story is about a young Vietnamese woman, Khanh, arriving in a small fishing town in New Brunswick to start work at the sardine-packing plant. The second story is of Gerhard Gruzintsky, a young Angolan man, who stows away in the undercarriage of an airplane. His frozen body is found with only a mobile phone, no ID, no passport. Sue, the women who finds him, is haunted by his death and arranges for a number of community groups to hold memorials for him.