Europe 1990. The Berlin Wall has just crumbled: Katrine (Juliane Koehler), raised in East Germany, but now living in Norway for the last 20 years, is a "war child" - the result of a romance between a Norwegian woman (Liv Ullmann) and a German occupation soldier during World War II. She enjoys a happy family life with her mother, her husband, daughter and granddaughter. But when a lawyer asks her and her mother to testify in a trial against the Norwegian state on behalf of the war children, she resists. Gradually, a web of concealments and secrecy is unveiled, until Katrine is faced with losing everything, and her loved ones are forced to take a stand: what matters more, the life they have lived together, or the lie it is based on?