The 17-year-old Amalia, the daughter of a widower lumberjack with many children, falls in love with a soldier. An irresponsible young man, the soldier refuses to admit that he is the father of the child to be born, as Amalia was just a fling in his eyes. Amalia decides to raise the kid all by herself, but she soon changes her mind…

Three sequences which could have formed separate stories are linked together to give a larger perspective on the nature of reality and film. The three episodes are joined together by one film crew at work. In the beginning, the crew is introduced as they juggle their dual roles as State-supported propagandists who laud their government and society, and as private movie makers working on their own film. Next, they are in a restaurant looking for suitable locations to film when the eatery’s owner is induced to wax long and lugubriously on his miserable life. In the last segment, two extras are in the background of a scene, sitting at a table in a restaurant. It slowly becomes apparent to one of them that the man he’s sitting with tortured him more than 40 years ago at a Nazi concentration camp during World War II.