9-year old orphan called Rasmus runs away from the orphanage. He meets a vagabond they call Paradise Oskar who likes to sing and play his accordion. Oskar makes the Rasmus world seem like a better place.

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.