Jukka, 13, is coached in photography by his openly gay art teacher. With his dead father's old camera, Jukka sees Johanna, a beautiful girl in her early twenties being physically abused by her stepfather. With the help of the local fire department, Jukka comes to her rescue. He quickly befriends the girl who works in a nearby supermarket, claims to become her manager and enters her in a beauty contest.
Two 9-year-old boys, Jontti and Länki, grow up in a Finnish seaside town in the 1960s. Länki's biggest dream is to run away on a ship to the sea where his father is rumoured to have died. Jontti too must discover that his father is not what he appears to be. When his dad moves away with another woman, Jontti is determined to win him back.
On her way home from an evening shift at a men's clothing store, Saara Nevanen is raped by a man whom she recognizes as her regular but eccentric customer, Antti Kaironen. The doctor and policemen question Saara in an insensitive manner,and she breaks down with guilt. When the court releases the perpetrator inlack of evidence, Saara's aggressive brother Jari talks her mild-mannered husband Sakari into a self-made revenge plot. Armed with two rifles, Jari and Sakari take matters into their own hands.
In Helsinki, an ex-law student turned slaughterhouse worker commits a senseless crime that catapults him into loneliness. Only a woman who accidentally arrived at the crime scene wants to follow him, but guilt and the tightening net of the police throw a shadow over their desperate love affair.