You might say EIFF has been following Jens Jonsson’s career for some time now. Many of his short films have screened here over the years, all the way back to Reparation (EIFF 2001). How satisfying it is to see all that early promise take the form of his highly accomplished debut feature, The King of Ping Pong. (In fact, one of those earlier short films, Bror Min (My Brother), seems now like a bit of a trial run for ... Ping Pong, dealing, as it does, with the sibling rivalry of two very different brothers.)

Overweight teen Rille lives with his equally corpulent mother and his slim, more athletic younger brother, Eric. Though very different, both boys are as dismissive of mum’s new squeeze, Gunnar, as they are keen to impress their mostly absent, alcoholic, oil rig worker father on his rare visits. Bullied at school (though he seems to almost encourage the attention), Rille only feels on top of things at the local youth centre, where his position as self-appointed steward of the key to the Ping Pong cupboard allows him to lord it over the younger kids. Ping Pong, reckons Rille, is the only real sport left. Everything changes when Rille overhears a conversation between his mother and Gunnar which causes him to wonder: why are he and his brother so completely different?

Pitched initially somewhere between Lasse Hallström’s seminal My Life As A Dog and Jared Hess’ Napoleon Dynamite, the film takes an altogether darker turn at the midpoint, with a startling family revelation which threatens to tear asunder Rille’s already fragile sense of where he fits in the grand scheme of things.

Beautifully filmed in the snow-bound frozen north of Sweden, Askild Edvardsen’s exceptional widescreen imagery won the World Cinema Jury Prize: Dramatic at the Sundance Film Festival, where the film also picked up the Grand Jury Prize in the same category.