Synopsis
Ivan Olsen is a gracile and shy eight-year-old who lives in an anonymous residential district of Copenhagen. Mum, Mrs. Olsen, is a nurse and housewife obsessed with housekeeping while her father, Mr. Torkild Olsen, a clerk in the municipal mechanographical center, is a fake comic book freak, among whom Tarzan prefers. Both parents unconsciously try to mitigate the boy's particularly sensitive and imaginative personality. The school environment is also not the best, a group of bullies often aims at Ivan with jokes and psychophysical violence. If this were not enough, the school teacher, although diligent and patient, can not understand that the educational difficulties of Ivan depend on dyslexia, a problem represented in the film through some sentences that move in the reading book dancing among them. Not caring for the advice of his father who, in addition to humiliating him with nicknames such as "rubber tarzan" and "pappamolle", encourages him to face bullying, and then who beats him, responding in turn to violence, Ivan bears the greyness of days taking refuge at the port to play in solitude with his kite. Here he casually meets Ole, a worker who maneuvers a huge cargo crane for containers. A profound friendship is established between the child and the worker. Ole seems to be the only adult to understand the delicate personality of Ivan, encouraging him, not in words but with concrete actions, to believe in himself and therefore to face daily life with greater serenity, courage, practical and civic sense, without however dampen the dreams of the young in the budding, indeed encouraging them to dream. Ole teaches little Ivan also to drive and maneuver the big cargo crane. After the umpteenth day of abuses and bullying, the little protagonist takes refuge inside an old abandoned container by the sea, here he dreams of being a superhero called "Gummi Tarzan" and to take revenge on all the harassment suffered by adults and classmates. "Awakened" from the daydream, Ivan finds himself again in the sad everyday reality; in the last minute, however, he succeeds in showing himself to the boys who persecute him of being able to drive Ole's big crane alone, leaving them open-mouthed. On Ivan's birthday nobody seems to remember it, neither the school teacher, nor his classmates, except of course Ole and his parents who organize a party for him to which Ivan invites his only true friend, the worker of the port. The same Ole, to celebrate Ivan, gives the same and his family a boat trip on a small island and here, the humble but wise character gives a great lesson of life to Mr. and Mrs. Olsen finally making understand the two parents that respect for the child's own attitudes goes hand in hand with a good education.