When Erica Maerlant is shot dead during a secret dance rehearsal at her luxurious villa, the Maerlant household turns out to be a serpent's nest of intrigue where everyone has a motive for the murder.

Cornelis van Doorn is the CEO of VD, a meat factory as well as a developer of contraceptives. Cornelis is the patriarch of the Van Doorn family: a decadent bunch of loose morals who only lust for money and power. When the man is thinking about retiring, he has to find the right heir to take over the family business.

The story of three torn apart families on the verge of Sinterklaasavond, the Dutch equivalent of Christmas Eve.

An out of work engineer is hired as the private chauffeur of a rich playboy, and has to drive to Vlissingen to pick up the latter's fiancée. On the way back from Vlissingen, the car breaks down and the engineer and the fiancée travel to Rotterdam to get some spare parts -- a trip full of amorous entanglements and mistaken identities.

This government commissioned film -- made on the occasion of the forty year anniversary of queen Wilhelmina's reign -- chronicles the lives of two Dutch families from 1898 to 1938 against the backdrop of the social and political events of the times. It shows the emergence of trade unions, the troubled years of the First World War, the development of aviation and Schiphol airport, the Dutch East Indies and the lives of the Dutch royal family.

When his colleague presents him with (forged) evidence of his wife Sylvette's unfaithfulness, factory owner Jean Sourdier kills him in a fit of rage. After fifteen years in prison he is determined to take revenge on his wife by killing Ninette, a daughter from her second marriage.