During a 24-hour period, a number of lives interweave. Kent and Ylva are actually an their way to the other side of the world, but things get in their way at every turn.

Guiseppe runs the neighbourhood bar together with his son Vinni. He is worried about his pregnant daughter Francesca. She lives in a tiny apartment with Niklas who is desperately trying to find a bigger place for them.

Skinheads Lasse and Jorma take a beer at Guiseppe's Bar - enter Pedro Martinez with an offer that Lasse and Jorma just cannot refuse.

This particular night is also a turning point for Micke. Just when he is about to burn down his school he meets Jeanette. Jeanette actually lives in the school and knows how to get up into the attic ...

They are all involved in a night they will never forget, a night when chance enters their lives and changes them forever ...

TIC TAG is a story that could only be told in a movie, it is composed of a number of separate stories about people at make-or-break moments in their lives: the police officer who needs a new apartment for his expanding family and gets unorthodox help from a fellow officer, Micke who wants to burn down his school but instead meets Jeanette, Kent — a wannabe Australia traveller and his Ylva, skinheads Lasse and Jorma who get a very strange propo-sal from the immigrant Pedro. Some stories are closely interwoven, others are no closer than people passing on the street. Their common denominator is that they all happen during one night in Stockholm.

— The Micke and Jeanette story is the only one shown in direct time sequence, the others move back and forward through time, says Daniel. The name of the film is a reflection of the role played by time in the film, even if other interpretations can also be inferred — a bomb ticking for example.

— I thought a lot about how the ordinary people in the film meet and interact in normal circumstances, they are just fairly ordinary types who find them-selves in extreme situations. This demanded a lot from the actors and I had to do a lot of screen tests with different people.

— In most movies there is just one main character who generally goes through some form of develop-ment. In TIC TAC, many people pass rapidly through serious emotional storms. Take Micke for example. He is absolutely manic at the start, then disgusting to Jeanette who puts him in such a Posi¬tion that he has to cry and beg for his life, finally he declares his love for her. Or the skinhead Lasse, the leader of the pack, who suddenly reveals to his amazed sidekick that he has fallen in love. But Lasse crosses the line and becomes dangerous. The actors had to be credible through all these shifts — and they are. I am very impressed.