It is the middle of the 19th century. A young couple, Kristina and Karl-Oskar, live in Smaland - a small rural community in southern Sweden. They survive on a small plot of infertile land. Times are difficult: there is bad weather, the harvests are poor and hunger prevails. Hunger forces the couple's first-born child to secretly eat food that was not ready for eating. This leads to the child's death and convinces the mother to accept the decision of the father to emigrate to the US. They are joined by another family running away from religious persecution and a man running away from a troublesome wife. The rest of the film traces their difficult journey on a rickety sailing ship that takes ten weeks to make it across the Atlantic and the inland journey to what is now Minnesota where the emigrants that survived the journey would start their new life in the New World.