In a traditional tribal society in the South Pacific, a young girl, Wawa, falls in love with her chief’s grandson, Dain. When an intertribal war escalates, Wawa is unknowingly betrothed as part of a peace deal. The young lovers run away, refusing her arranged fate. They must choose between their hearts and the future of the tribe, while the villagers must wrestle with preserving their traditional culture and adapting it to the increasing outside demands for individual freedom.

The Kempf family lives on three different farms at different altitudes in the Schächen Valley in the Canton of URI. ten times a year they move from farm to farm with their livestock: up the mountain in the spring, down to the valley in autumn – and then up again in winter to farm their called “Pfaffen”, at an altitude of 1725 meters above sea level. This is where they feed their livestock the hav they have collected from the steep alpine slopes during the summer. The film is an intimate portrait of a family, with who the farmer's grandparents and his sister also live. Over the course of the year, the film director and the family developed a close relationship, close enough to render visible the problems of modern times in conjunction with this archaic lifestyle, problems which the farmers refuse to let get them down.