A mayor wants to get rid of homeless people who blacken his Christmas.

The action unfolds in a country about which we know nothing, a land of snow and forests, somewhere in the North. A family lives in an isolated house near a lake. Alexi, a young, pure-hearted man, is a woodcutter. Occasionally suffering from epileptic seizures and overcome by an ecstatic state, he is one with the nature around him. Alexi is very close to his younger sister, Hege. Their blind mother, father, and younger brother, silently observe this uncontrollable love. One day a stranger arrives, a young man slightly older than Alexi.

"What are we actually doing here?" Miel asks Jack Van Poll, the pianist. "Earning a living, I suppose?" is the laconic reply. But Miel wants more out of life than playing in a jazz band, away from the worries of his wife and child who constantly need money from him. Between dream and deed... but then he is suddenly confronted with harsh reality.

In the 1890s, Father Adolf Daens goes to Aalst, a textile town where child labor is rife, pay and working conditions are horrible, the poor have no vote, and the Catholic church backs the petite bourgeoisie in oppressing workers. He writes a few columns for the Catholic paper, and soon workers are listening and the powerful are in an uproar. He's expelled from the Catholic party, so he starts the Christian Democrats and is elected to Parliament. After Rome disciplines him, he must choose between two callings, as priest and as champion of workers. In subplots, a courageous young woman falls in love with a socialist and survives a shop foreman's rape; children die; prelates play billiards.