As they tour Sweden in a theatrical production of "Lysistrata", performing to often uncomprehending audiences, three women find their own lives and marriages mirrored in Aristophanes’s play. Soon, onstage drama, offstage reality, and surrealist fantasies begin to collide.

Staffan Stolle becomes the sole heir to a rich and noble family when he is just a little boy. Early on he is engaged to be married to a girl he finds he does not love. Instead he flees the country only to return under a false name, looking for true love.

A boy lies and dreams in his bed in the kitchen, wakes up and takes a kitchen knife with him to bed and falls asleep. He dreams that he kills everyone at a game table, except for his father, whom he takes out on a tram ride. The boy wakes up again and waits for the father to come home and when he does, the mother and the father quarrel about something. The morning comes and the boy goes out, finally ends up at the beer café where the father and his beer friends are sitting.

A Swedish immigrant family struggles to adapt to their new life on the American frontier during the second half of the 19th century amidst civil war, native uprising and the lure of gold in California.

Bob and Bernard serve as lieutenants on a cruiser. They intend to enjoy themselves.

A young American girl is found dead in Gota Kanal, Swedens largest channel. Since there are hardly any clues or evidence at all it seems as if the murder cant be solved. Martin Beck and his men are assigned to the case. Soon they find a likely suspect and together with a police woman they begin a cat and mouse game to catch him.

Two women—a fashion executive and her young model—experience parallel romantic disappointments during a trip to Gothenburg, exposing generational differences in desire, illusion, and emotional endurance. A transitional work in Ingmar Bergman’s mid-1950s cinema.