The Slingshot

The film is set in Stockholm in the nineteen-twenties. Roland grows up in a house with a socialist father, a Jewish mother and an older brother who boxes. His mother sells condoms illegally; Roland turns them into slingshots and sells those at school. His teacher punishes him at every opportunity, and the neighbourhood eyes the family sideways because of the father's politics. The more the boy's resourcefulness earns, the deeper the trouble goes, and it finally takes him as far as the door of a reform school. It comes from Roland Schütt's book about his own childhood, which is why the telling feels like remembering rather than instruction. Åke Sandgren keeps the antisemitism and class division of the period in view without turning the film into a story of suffering; Roland's cunning and humour stay in front. Stellan Skarsgård plays the father together with his faith in the labour movement of those years. The young Jesper Salén carries the film.