A socially realistic drama about the relationship between a mother and her teenage daughter in a windswept port town in Jutland. The mother is from Copenhagen and was once a beauty queen. Now she is married to a fisherman, works at the fish filleting factory, and is having an affair with the factory's unsympathetic owner. She has come to terms with her life, but her daughter cannot accept a future cutting up fish. When she wins a local beauty contest, she sees a chance to escape, but things turn out differently.