Three siblings ingeniously avoid being sent off to a children's home while their solo-mother serves a short sentence in a prison for shoplifting. Rather than have the news leak out and have to be escorted off with the eccentric welfare officer, they invent a 'never present' dad who is looking after them.

The true story of the Fiils: a family of innkeepers who, during Nazi-Germany's occupation of Denmark, took up arms against the German occupiers. But in the fight for freedom, some must die so that others may live.