Keswick Film Club - Little Trouble Girls

Synopsis

Shy, introverted,16 year-old Lucija joins a Catholic choir where she is befriended by Ana-Marija, "a confident, popular senior who, like Lucija, sings Alto. One of several new girls in the choir, Lucija finds herself standing between Ana-Marija and her friend Klara and is caught up in the slipstream of their racy gossip and scandalous confidences" - Wendy Ide, ScreenDaily.

Lucija's over-protected life (she has not even been allowed to wear lipstick) is faced by the challenge of growing up like everyone, especially the sexual awakening she is feeling. Director Urska Djukic's "coming of age drama is heady with intertwined sensual and religious symbolism; the first rate score and sound design teases out the tangled, conflicting impulses towards Catholic devotion and erotic abandon" - Wendy Ide again.

That said, do not expect a lurid film; the director follows both Lucija's naivety and Ana-Marija's more worldly ways, "each zigzagging along that fine line between immature posturing and actual, exhilarating self-realization, evoking that transitional stage through which girls like them can often seem at least three ages at once. The writing fizzes with the giddy conversational rhythms and savage banter of the generation under scrutiny, but occasionally surprises with an earnest, pensive digression: The film takes seriously, even philosophically, Lucia's struggle to reconcile her emerging libido with a Catholic faith she's more or less taken as given until now" - Guy Lodge, Variety .