Dir: Urška Djuki |
Urska Djuki’s award-winning films certainly have enticing titles – her first feature Little Trouble Girls screening at this year’s Berlinale follows on from her short film Granny’s Sexual Life, an animated documentary (2021). But should you judge a book by its cover.?
This erotic Slovenian debut has all the requisite ingredients for a gently titillating watch: nuns, a Catholic convent, and pubescent girls. Poetic and delicately captured in intimate close-up and occasionally on the wide screen it brings to mind the work of Walerian Borowczyk in particular with a more mainstream, modern twist.
Lucia, 16, is an ardent Catholic – and ardent’s certainly the right work to describe this nubile young thing who frolics around in shorts, the wind caressing her freshly washed hair. We see her giggling with the other Convent girlies, and up to all sorts of naughty antics, getting close to senior Ana-Maria. The mother superior then describes, quite eloquently, her close relationship with God. The girls are filled with awe at this explanation of ‘faith’. Later Lucia is mesmerised by a naked man on the river bank. Dashing back to the convent, the camera focuses on her neck while she relieves her pent up desire.
Urska Djuki is certainly talented and has reinvented this kind of light-hearted vaguely naughty erotic fare with its serious undercurrent.@MeredithTaylor
FIPRESCI prize | PERSPECTIVES | BERLINALE 2025