The war years of the 1940s have come to the remote districts of Sweden where paths to the other world are narrow and restricted, and where people must rely on themselves alone. Sweden still has peace, but ...

Here lives 13-year-old Erika with her parents, Marta and Axel, her grandmothers and their friends. They are a closely-united family, but life for each of them means something different.

Marta has knuckled under. She is a strong woman who has mastered her own will. For her, there is no other world than the one in which she lives. She has furnished it with her little dreams and hopes. Erika is 13 and her father's daughter. She knows nothing of the world outside. She is uncertain whetner she is a child or a woman. She has suspicions of a wider world, one where you can live your own life, go forward, achieve self-determination. She doesn't want to be like her parents.

Ingrid Thulin was for several decades Sweden's best-known international actress. She performed for Ingmar Bergman. She lived in Italy and acted there, in Switzerland and in France. She was the strange humming bird whose name was respected by all, or the startled deer to which she was likened when she made her first breakthrough on the stage and in films.

Thulin returned to Sweden a few summers ago to make One and One with her friends Erland Josephson and Sven Nykvist. The film received international acclaim and attention. Then she disappeared once again to Italy, but returned with the script for Broken Sky,/i>. She made it in the deserted villages of her origin, the wild mountains, the enormous forests, the waters so rich in fish.