Seppan has been compared with My Life as a Dog for the deadpan wonder with which it portrays the initiation of children into the mysteries of the adult world. Seppan is the name of a small industrial suburb of Stockholm where the filmmaker herself grew up alongside children of immigrants from all parts of war-ravaged Europe. In 1961, they are witness to Sputnik as it flashes across the sky, as well as to their own fantasies (the boy who sees an eagle no one else can see) and yearnings (the girl who only wants to belong). Agneta Fagerström-Olsson was that girl, the daughter of a company manager and separated from the others by her family's big white house with the well tended garden. But the mood of Seppan affects her as well-a mood created by a yellowed river downstream from a paper mill, and shabby dwellings in which, the director says, "secrets, yearning and disillusionment hummed. Here our senses were created, here our reason was built... To be a Seppan child was to learn at an early age that the world is composed of many truths and many languages and that life was to be lived, in spite of all." The public schools were Fagerström-Olsson's talent-scouting grounds and she elicits wonderfully unselfconscious performances from her child actors.