Young Peter has a difficult time adjusting at school having been confined to a wheelchair after an accident. He still wants to participate in the school outing and play and wants to come up with a way to make the play actors 'fly' like fairies. By chance the local inventor Quirinus Drijfhout and his son Felix have just perfected their 'Zerostraler', a machine that can make any object float in mid air.

A family owning a traditional flea circus tries to survive next to the new attraction on the fair.

Thanks to his actions during a farm fire, the young and naive Dreas is appointed to the local fire department, which awakens various ambitions in him. He constructs primitive watchtowers everywhere and achieves some successes, partly due to the activities of an arsonist. He is then allowed to attend a course at the fire academy in Maastricht. Back in his village, he fails during a fire at the local bakery, where everything goes wrong. Dismissed from his position, he finds new employment as a market vendor with a fire extinguisher he invented.

In the Belgian hamlet of Verbrande Brug, former lovers Monique and Louis reconnect at a carnival, stirring up drama with their current partners.