14/02/2025 - BERLINALE 2025: Debuting director Urška Djukić offers up a fresh and beguiling take on the female coming-of-age story

Jara Sofija Ostan (left) and Mina Švajger in Little Trouble Girls

With her first feature, Little Trouble Girls [+see also:
trailer
film profile], Slovenian filmmaker Urška Djukić sets the bar high for debuts at this year’s Berlinale. While we watch the shy 16-year-old Lucia (Jara Sofija Ostan) navigate teen sexuality, family and friend group dynamics both with and despite the help of a newfound friend in the face of the more uninhibited Ana-Maria (Mina Švajger), there’s always something bubbling under the surface. Little Trouble Girls is a beguiling work with a vision that is both curious and self-assured; a combination that imbues the coming-of-age tropes it references with exuberance and vitality. The film, named after the Sonic Youth song you may hear at a certain point of its running time, has world-premiered in the festival’s brand-new Perspectives Competition.

Lucia’s journey to adulthood has more than one beginning. The first time we meet her, she’s just joined an all-girl Catholic choir under the watchful gaze of a man – the only man in the film for a while – the conductor (Saša Tabaković). Then, she befriends Ana-Maria, whose frisky jokes and queen-bee attitude seem to pull in our introverted protagonist like gravity. Later, she sees a naked man (Mattia Cason) for the first time, voyeuristically and from afar. There’s a fluttering sense of novelty projected in those scenes, but it’s neither heavy-handed nor strictly choreographed. Cinematographer Lev Predan Kowarski attends to Lucia’s taciturn presence in facial close-ups and subjective shots that draw the viewer into whatever fascinates this young girl, even if it’s her new friend’s belly button.

In the script co-written with Maria Bohr (a collaborator on Djukić’s winner of the 2022 European Film Award for Best Short Film, Granny’s Sexual Life), there is just the right amount of backstory, conflict and tension to frame this story as a coming-of-self: with all of its attendant hardships and joy. But its tight running time and well-developed narrative structure also allow Little Trouble Girls some liberties. For example, the girls gently prod the role of religion in their upbringing, and the film explores the concept of sin in the most intriguing of ways: through the eyes of a young girl on the cusp of her sexual awakening. In a game of truth and dare, Lucia has to kiss the most beautiful girl in the convent where the choir rehearsals are; she goes for a statue of the Virgin Mary in what is perhaps the most transcendent scene that a debut has gifted us in a long, long while.

Djukić and her collaborators craft a rich and textured mosaic of desire and shame in a way that perfectly encapsulates the feeling of being a 16-year-old girl (especially in the “more Eastern” part of Europe): every moment of intimacy is both weighty and light, terrifyingly urgent and fleeting at the same time. There’s something radically sincere in the way Little Trouble Girls brings in sex and sin on the same plane and refuses to work it out; not for us, not for Lucia. Space is what makes desire grow, and Djukić already employs it well, both narratively and formally, in a captivating debut film.

Little Trouble Girls was produced by Slovenia’s SPOK Films, in co-production with Staragara IT (Italy), 365 Films (Croatia), Non-Aligned Films (Serbia), Nosorogi (Slovenia) and OINK (Slovenia). Heretic handles its world sales.