Runtime: 108 minutes

Written by: Mika Gustafson and Alexander Öhstrand

Directed by: Mika Gustafson

Starring: Bianca Delbravo, Dilvin Asaad, Safira Mossberg, Ida Engvoll

By Sarah Manvel

This disturbing Swedish film about sisterhood just won the prize for best first feature at the London Film Festival. “Paradise is Burning” is disturbing almost not for what it shows, but what it doesn’t, which is to say, it rips apart the image of Sweden as a country which leaves no child behind. But in doing so it avoids pretty nearly every cliché about young girls in peril to focus instead on how the bonds between girls can be stronger than almost anything.

It’s summertime and there’s three of them: sixteen-year-old Laura (Bianca Delbravo), thirteen-year-old Mira (Dilvin Asaad) and seven-year-old Steffi (Safira Mossberg). They live in public housing – though to American eyes, it’s significantly nicer than any public housing known to us – on the outskirts of an unnamed Swedish city. It’s quickly apparent their mother has skipped out. (Father/s are never mentioned.) Their mother has disappeared before, to the point Laura runs into one of her former social workers at the shops, but never for this long. It’s not a secret either. The gang of girls the sisters run with, one of whom is pregnant and all of whom have experience of foster care, all know they are on their own, as do the neighbours, who sometimes offer cash or food. The girls stay clean, go to school, maintain the house and shoplift groceries together, but no one is taking responsibility for them. They are on their own. Sine Vadstrup Brooker’s cinematography subtly reinforces this by staying a little lower than usual, at the height of a child, bringing us into their world. But the calls from the social workers are starting to escalate. They’re mostly temps who don’t know the family, but it’s becoming clear to Laura their freedom is running out.

Then the gang is caught partying in a house they broke into, and in the scramble to escape Laura is separated from the others. A woman unloading groceries from her car, Hanna (Ida Engvoll), shields Laura from the furious homeowner and then once the coast is clear offers some food, which Laura wolfs. They make guarded small talk and when Laura describes how easy it is to get into empty houses, Hanna doesn’t believe her. They arrange to meet in town and both show up, to each other’s surprise. Then Laura identifies an apartment, the owners of which are obviously on holiday, and gets inside through the simple method of asking a neighbour for the keys. Inside they sip liquor and play records, smoke a joint and read the homeowner’s diaries. Then a little later they find another empty home and do it again. And Laura starts to wonder if the social workers would leave them alone if Hanna pretended to be their mother.

Meanwhile Mira gets her first period, a cause for crass jokes and a drunken party in a field, and Steffi makes friends with an equally feral little boy, and the summer continues. The strange dance between Hanna and Laura – over time the reasons for Hanna’s recklessness and irresponsibility slowly become clear – is somehow not creepy or frightening, mostly because Hanna is treating their jaunts as a fun vacation and has no real idea of how serious Laura’s problems are. The adults who do know are largely indifferent; there’s a brief encounter with an aunt, who barely deserves the title, and the older neighbour who Mira befriends in a karaoke bar is too worried about his own stage fright to focus on her. The biggest danger comes from bigger girls, like the ones who fight Mira one afternoon, or others who decide it’s funny to teach Steffi how to spell some (very strong) swear words and force her to eat dirt when she gets upset. But Steffi doesn’t snitch, a deliberate choice so her sisters don’t worry. Mira doesn’t talk about karaoke, and Laura doesn’t talk about Hanna. But they almost don’t need to get into the details of their lives with each other. The bonds between them go deeper than that. 

The actresses playing the sisters are non-professionals, scouted from the streets à la Andrea Arnold. Mr Öhstrand directly referenced “Fish Tank” when he described to a London Film Festival audience how he found Miss Delbravo. (At the time he was acting in a TV show set in the seventies, meaning he had the worst possible haircut for approaching a random teenage girl, but when he called Ms Gustafson to beg her to do it she made him do it instead.) This is often done when working with children in highly charged plots, in that untrained performers are sometimes willing to go further onscreen and/or make themselves look bad in ways professionals just won’t. This makes it sound exploitative, which this isn’t in the slightest. These girls don’t want to hurt themselves or anybody else, and none of the adults want to hurt them either. It’s just nobody cares about them but each other. It means the stakes could not be higher, but fortunately Ms Gustafson doesn’t over-egg the pudding. This should be the beginning of excellent careers for everybody involved.