20/08/2024 - The Golden Leopard-winning Lithuanian director tells us more about her story of two girls who try to make a better life for themselves by enrolling in a modelling school

(© Locarno Film Festival/Ti-Press)

Lithuanian director Saulė Bliuvaitė won the Golden Leopard with her debut feature, Toxic [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Directors Talks @ European …
interview: Saulė Bliuvaitė
film profile], only a couple of days after the film premiered in competition at the Locarno Film Festival (see the news). In the aftermath of her win, she talked to Cineuropa about her story of two 13-year-old girls – Marija (Vesta Matulytė) and Kristina (Ieva Rupeikaitė) – who try to make a better life for themselves by enrolling in a modelling school.

Cineuropa: The post-industrial setting is very prominent in Toxic. Where did you shoot?
Saulė Bliuvaitė: We shot in my hometown [Kaunas]. We used a lot of locations in that area. It’s the second-biggest city in Lithuania, but during the Soviet occupation, it was an industrial epicentre. Today, there are a lot of abandoned buildings around. My approach to location scouting was just to go home [laughs].

The film can, in some ways, be set anywhere, but it’s also important that its two teenage protagonists are going through things right then and there.
Yes, and I think the label “poverty porn” has been thrown around, but I find it insulting. Many people still live in such circumstances – those places exist, and teenage girls grow up there wanting to be somewhere else. Yes, now we’re part of the European Union, we’re okay, and around the world, there are places where conditions are far worse. The worse it is for you, the more pain you can endure before you leave for something better.

I’m curious about this particular age – being 13 and being between childhood and womanhood. How important was it for you to include scenes where the girls are playing sports in a back alley, alongside the modelling classes they take where they are treated as grown-ups?
As you said, when you’re 13, you still haven't said goodbye to your toys. You play with Barbies, even though you also smoke cigarettes. It’s such a peculiar time. It was important to include the games because that was their happy place, not the modelling. It all comes from a sense of responsibility: when children grow up in a difficult situation, they start to feel that they have to provide for themselves, for their family, very early on. For them, that’s work.

There’s also a stark contrast with the dance sequences. Can you tell us more about the presentation of bodies in these dances?
These are my favourite parts of the film! I really wanted peculiar movements because the movie is connected to the body. And I really wanted people in Toxic to move in a strange way all the time, and that’s especially visible in the dances. I specifically asked the choreographer for a dance that would not look feminine; that’s a stereotype I wanted to avoid, the young girls looking sexy or performatively feminine. Sexuality is not the biggest part of being a teenager. For those particular characters, it isn’t, and that’s why they’re kind of afraid of being brought into intimate situations.

Can you talk about the relationship between Marija and Kristina? At first, it’s a bit prickly, but they never compete with one another. There is friendship, sisterhood, love…
I didn’t have a clear idea to begin with; it developed along the way. I wanted to create a relationship that would go from just friends to some kind of romantic connection, without emphasising sexuality. So, we stay in this zone where you actually don’t label what they have, but it’s still deep.

Do you think your young actors were feeling more vulnerable or more empowered because they are from a different generation than we are?
It was a very interesting process for me because at first, I wanted to set it in the past, and make it related to my story. But when we started the casting process and I was talking with the girls, I realised I wanted to use their stories as well. As a result, Toxic became this hybrid, where you see these old buildings and people using smartphones. Actually, after two years of casting and making this film, only then did I understand the vibe of that generation. At first, everything in the script was connected to my past experiences, and some of those things really clicked with them. Some things have changed, but some things have stayed the same. I thought that times had changed now for good, but while listening to the stories the younger girls would tell me, I recognised a lot of the same trauma. But other times, I was struck by how bold they would act, how they are able to just tell someone, “Stop it,” or “I don’t like this.” They are better at creating boundaries than we were.