City girl Emma marries the farmer Nicklas but gets involved in a love triangle with his brother Ragnar.

Celebrated elderly Austrian poet opposes nazism, while his daughter admires and falls in love with leading nazi activist, who eventually becomes concentration camp commander with his father-in-law as prisoner.

A young woman dies by suicide and leaves all her belongings to her next-door neighbour, who becomes determined to investigate her reasons for taking her life.

Midsummer Eve in Malmfors in the 1880s. The holiday is celebrated with a big party. Three blacksmiths leave the ironworks and become drifters, seeking out jobs elsewhere. During their travels, they come across beautiful girls as well as jobs in different ironworks, where the workers are organizing, monitored by a brutal police force.

A young, shy and inexperienced man travels back to Sweden, to spend the summer at his mother's house. He meets a number of women with whom he has sexual relations.

Laban Lundström is the porter at Hotell Kåkbrinken. The hotel is threatened by wholesaler Sjökvist, who wants to pull down the house and build a new and modern house instead.

A stateless lawyer comes with his son Karel and his two daughters Vanja and Sonja as refugees to Stockholm. No one gets work permit in Sweden and the family's problems grows to not just financially. The idleness and hopelessness towards the future is almost worse and that can lead into dangerous paths.

A Swedish cargo ship is in the winter of 1938 at the dock in Gdynia in Poland, waiting to depart with coal to Sweden. In a tavern in the port a Polish dockworkers tries to tell something to the Swedish sailors, but is rudely turned away by the tavern owner. Later in the evening the port worker is found dead. That same evening one of the Swedish sailors, meets a Jewish woman who has fled Nazi Germany.

The estate Bokegård has big debts, mostly because the owner Måns Nilsson and his daughter Rose Marie just care about their horses.

Rönneberga is an old family manor. When Lennart Heijken is born, his proud father buys his newborn a grandfather's clock that will follow him through his life and see him become a student, an officer, a married man, and eventually an old man.