A story about love, dancing and survival, set in the late 40s. Jan Mayer, a young dance-master, arrives in a sanatorium for lung diseases with a serious diagnosis - tuberculosis. But he does not give in to his illness and starts fighting it actively with his optimism and his dancing. Gradually he wins over other patients, who had been accepting their fate passively under strict institutional discipline. But his sickness soon breaks out in full its force.