Paradise is Burning (REVIEW) | Projector Shorts | Three wild sisters trying to survive girlhood - video Dailymotion

Three sisters have to fend for themselves in this award-winning Swedish drama, and Film Brain thinks is a gritty but bittersweet tale of girlhood.

Transcript

00:00Growing up is tough in Mika Gustafsson's Swedish drama Paradise is Burning,

00:04which won awards at the Venice and London Film Festivals in 2023.

00:0816-year-old Laura takes care of her younger sisters Mira, 12, and Steffi, 7, after their mother abandons them,

00:16largely through petty theft and breaking into people's homes to party with their friends,

00:20but a looming social services visit threatens their family unit.

00:24All three of the sisters are complete unknowns who have never been in a film before,

00:28but you wouldn't know it because they're so natural on screen,

00:31with Bianca del Bravo being especially impressive as Laura,

00:35who manages to nail being tough but also vulnerable.

00:38Laura also gets the most interesting subplot in the movie,

00:40where she teams up with a bored housewife who wants to learn Laura's ways of cons and hustles.

00:46This is an often beautifully shot and propulsively edited movie that's driven by character than by plot,

00:51and evokes comparisons to, say, Scrapper or The Florida Project.

00:55It's a bittersweet tale of sisterhood and the rites of passage of growing up as a girl.