Kristian Almgren

As children in the loving Ekdahl family, Fanny and Alexander enjoy a happy life with their parents, who run a theater company. After their father dies unexpectedly, however, the siblings end up in a joyless home when their mother, Emilie, marries a stern bishop. The bleak situation gradually grows worse as the bishop becomes more controlling, but dedicated relatives make a valiant attempt to aid Emilie, Fanny and Alexander.

It is the first day of the summer vacation. Jojje, Jerker and Fabian wants to borrow a sailing boat to take a boat trip so they steal it. They plan to examine all of Lake Maelaren, but a storm breaks out and the boat sinks. They go ashore, steal food and a new boat. While everybody else believes them to be dead, they have a wonderful time. They meet a crazy Count and find a dead body.

One Monday morning, a thousand children leave the suburb of Farsta and go to Stockholm to occupy the Royal Castle. The children have formed a group called S.O.P.O.R. as a protest against the way adults treat them and have destroyed their future. They demand that the robots in the industry are replaced by humans to create job opportunities. They take the royal family as hostages.

Through the eyes of ten-year-old Alexander, we witness the delights and conflicts of the Ekdahl family, a sprawling bourgeois clan in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Sweden.