Carl Quist Møller

In a small two-room apartment in a backyard in Vesterbro, Copenhagen, 14-year-old Ester lives with her father, mother, and older brother Carl. It is a typical working-class neighborhood of the time, and the apartment lacks any modern conveniences. Coal must be fetched from a dark basement where homeless people have sought shelter and lodging for the night. Ester is a dreamer. She wants to be a writer and secretly writes poetry. She often loses track of time and place when her thoughts wander.

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."

It all begins when ex-boxer and motel owner Ford Fordson wants to get a little workout Rocky-style in the kitchen meat locker. But the door falls shut, and only opens from the outside. Fordson deep-freezes to death. So his son Willy, who is also a boxer, comes home and finds his childhood sweetheart Julie again. But their romance is short-lived, for the ghost of Ford appears to Willy and orders him to find out who slammed the meat locker door shut on him. It turns out the list of possible suspects is a long one indeed.

Alice does not live at home but with friends in an abandoned factory. She sells drugs to enable them to fulfill their dream of a tavern. When the police are after her, she seeks Hour switch. Here she meets Berit and helps Berit mother south on vacation. But simultaneously pursues Alice of a drug kingpin but cheating him.