When a lively young family moves in next door, grumpy widower Otto Anderson meets his match in a quick-witted, pregnant woman named Marisol, leading to an unlikely friendship that turns his world upside down.
59 year-old Ove is the block’s grumpy man. Several years ago he was deposed as president of the condominium association, but he could not give a damn about being deposed and therefore keeps looking over the neighborhood with an iron fist. When pregnant Parvaneh and her family move into the terraced house opposite Ove and accidentally back into Ove’s mailbox it sets off the beginning of an unexpected change in his life.
Agnes feels stuck. Unlike her best friend, Lydie, who’s moved to New York and is now expecting a baby, Agnes still lives in the New England house they once shared as graduate students, now working as a professor at her alma mater. A ‘bad thing’ happened to Agnes a few years ago and, since then, despite her best efforts, life hasn’t gotten back on track.
Josef is a successful violin maker. He enjoys seeing the instruments he makes bring joy to people all over the world. He himself prefers to spend his time in his workshop in the courtyard of a tenement house. He has never been to the sea; his sea is a puddle in the courtyard, which he protects from drying out so that the birds have something to drink. He has no wife or children, only his dog Pampeliška, who accompanies him everywhere. Josef secretly loves his beautiful neighbor Anežka and looks forward to Wednesday chess games with his best friend Václav, a charismatic piano tuner.
J.R. is a fatherless boy growing up in the glow of a bar where the bartender, his Uncle Charlie, is the sharpest and most colorful of an assortment of quirky and demonstrative father figures. As the boy’s determined mother struggles to provide her son with opportunities denied to her — and leave the dilapidated home of her outrageous if begrudgingly supportive father — J.R. begins to gamely, if not always gracefully, pursue his romantic and professional dreams, with one foot persistently placed in Uncle Charlie’s bar.
An optimistic, talented teen clings to a huge secret: she's homeless and living on a school bus. When tragedy strikes, can she learn to accept a helping hand?