Siskonranta, a remote village in early post-war southern Lapland. 19-year-old Martta lives on a farm in the plains of the Finnish taiga. The naive, vivacious farmer's daughter is pregnant after an affair with Oula, a philandering reindeer herdsman. Her alcoholic father, Juhani, subsequently threatens to kill Oula. Devoid of any over-romanticism of nature, the film gives an almost documentary, nightmarish account of a society beyond the civilized world, shaped by backwardness, poverty and oppression. "The Finland presented here is entirely different from the one we are shown by the Kaurismäkis. Molberg's first two films are adaptations of novels by Timo Mukka, the Finnish D. H. Lawrence of the 1960s; they are "heimatfilm" genre productions about desire and despair, trance and death, the personal union of Christ and the devil, shot on location in the sparse landscapes of the North; films about solitude in everyday life, between dances and sermons, coffee and alcohol, tenderness and violation." (Fritz Göttler, Viennale, Vienna 2003)