My First Love, based on newcomer Mari Storstein's very own experience and drawing on factual research conducted for her earlier documentary Letter to Jens (2011), which demonstrated how the Norwegian municipality in which one lives determines the kind of life one gets to live, tells the story of a girl in a wheelchair at the threshold of maturity, finding her way to social and love life, until the special care designed to make her life easier suddenly stands in her way. Plenty of films tackling disability expose the stigma towards people with special needs, mostly in interpersonal relationships, but this coming-of-age romantic dramedy, recently presented at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival’s First Feature Competition, tackles slightly different questions: to what extent does healthcare really care, even in a highly regarded welfare state such as Norway? And will there ever be a real solution?

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Nineteen-year-old Ella (Marie Flaatten) is about to begin her first year at university in another town. Being in a wheelchair since forever has not prevented her from having a fulfilling life, mostly thanks to her loving family, who never treated her as incapable, as well as–and not least–her personal assistant. However, the Lillehammer municipality, where she is moving to, cannot provide her with such private care, and her only option for the time being is to move into a home for people with special needs. Aware of the inflexibility of such institutions, her parents advise her to skip a year and wait for a better solution, but Ella is impatient to fly out of the nest.

Soon perfectly integrated into the university environment, her attention is drawn to Oliver (Niels Skåber), a poet with a guitar, and they shyly but eagerly start seeing each other. But her health supervisors are more of an obstacle than any kind of help in this natural turn of life, closely monitoring her, imposing curfews and a no-night-visits policy, while apparently considering love and sex to be activities reserved only for the able-bodied. Ella’s life in the dorm resembles more an involuntary monastic seclusion, which frustrates her but does not discourage her: she is determined to oppose it.

Narratively structured in perhaps too straightforward a way, without much cinematic playfulness, My First Love feels like a piece of TV cinema, where the urgency to tell the story and express the emotions around it overshadows the search for an artistic form. On the other hand, the sincerity of these openly shared first-hand experiences is so heartwarming that one easily becomes immersed in Ella and Oliver's world, whose love, like that of modern-day Romeo and Juliet, ends up being obstructed by shortsightedness and institutional narrow-mindedness.

Non-professional actress Marie Flaatten’s performance is disarmingly authentic–both in the patience and humour with which she encourages those around her to treat her as “normal” (“Relax, you’re not going to break me,” she tells Oliver on their first romantic night), and in her angry reactions toward the bigotry that limits her freedom.

The hopeful ending suggests an activist nuance, but the film is much more than that, smoothly balancing social and purely humanistic layers.

My First Love was produced by Norway’s Nordisk Film Production in co-production with Filmbin. World sales are handled by Denmark’s TrustNordisk.