A couple that seems happy on the surface considers a divorce.
A drama-documentary film about the fatal effect of poor living conditions on health – the so-called "social inheritance." The principal characters in the film are two fourteen or fifteen-year-old children, Carl and Hanne. Covering a hundred-year period and drawing on case stories recorded by actual hospital staff, the film illustrates a number of variations of "the same old story."
When his mother is widowed, Ole is sent to boarding school. There he soon discovers that other boys have their problems too.
