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"For every school day there is a battle to be won," hated headmaster Lindum Svendsen (Bent Mejding) tells his pupils in Danish melodrama We Shall Overcome. Those words come back to haunt him when 13-year-old Frits (Janus Dissing Rathke), inspired by the speeches of Martin Luther King, decides to stand up against his petty tyranny. Set in the summer of 1969, Niels Arden Oplev's fact-based tale, a kind of Scandinavian If...., has us rooting for its young hero all the way.

Problems come not single spies but in battalions for Master Frits, who is forced to cope not just with his abusive principal but also with a dad (Jens Jørn Spottag) suffering from clinical depression. Help arrives in the long-haired form of Freddie Svale (Anders W Berthelsen), a hippy substitute teacher who nurtures the boy's interest in rock music, free-thinking and passive resistance. As the local community rallies behind his nemesis, however, Frits realises standing up for one's rights isn't all it's cracked up to be.

"REFRESHINGLY UNSENTIMENTAL FABLE"

While English schoolchildren hardly need any encouragement when it comes to defying their teachers, there's a positive, inspirational message to be gleaned here. We Shall Overcome is a well-made, refreshingly unsentimental fable, reminiscent of Dead Poets Society and 2005 Swedish potboiler Evil. If there's a flaw here, it's Oplev's reluctance to give Mejding's character any colour beyond glowering, malevolent black. Prone to bloodying his charges' noses, scheming against their parents and ripping earlobes from their moorings, the only thing missing from this small-town monster is a moustache to twirl.

In Danish with English subtitles.