A film director fights his way through a blizzard to a house that once belonged to a world-famous author, now dead (Thorkild Hansen). The director breaks into the house and steals copious amounts of material he takes with him to a hideout in a small Swedish cinema. The director spends months in a desperate struggle to come to grips with the vast material as he attempts to turn it into the poetic, painful film he has dreamed of making for so many years. The peace and quiet in which he expects to work is interrupted by a Swedish woman (Ewa Fröling, familiar as the mother in Bergman's Fanny and Alexander), who has also hidden away in the town since the breakup of her marriage.