Lilya 4-ever (2000). An individual shipwreck that eventually becomes an allegorical fresco
Lilya is 16 years old and lives in a run-down neighborhood of a city in the former Soviet Union…
Lilya is 16 years old and lives in a shabby neighborhood of a city in the former Soviet Union where life is anything but easy, so she is obviously excited about going to the US with her parents for good.
But one night at dinner, her mother tells her that she can join them later.
Shortly thereafter, she discovers that she has been abandoned by her mother, who has even given up her parental rights in order to start a new life with her current partner.
Abandoned by her mother, penniless and with the stigma of a whore attached to her, she is forced to make ends meet somehow.
Her friendship with Volodya, an 11-year-old boy who would really do anything for her, has remained the only good thing in her very young existence.
The two spend their days running away from the insults of the other kids in the neighborhood, all the while dreaming of a better life.
Lilya finally finds hope when she meets Andrei, with whom she falls in love and who soon asks her to follow him to Sweden to start a new life.
But the boy’s proposal to move to Sweden is a terrible trap.
The movie is based on a true story, that of Danguole Rasalaite, and deals with an issue that is still very topical today: human trafficking.
Indeed, the collapse of the empire behind the curtain (the Soviet Union and all the states of the former communist bloc) has led to the sudden degradation of structures that were already precarious.
It is impossible to imagine anything more abominable for a whole generation that knew nothing but the enormous shame of one and only one system (communism).
Lilya (Oksana Akinshina) is only sixteen years old, and the area where she lives, which consists of an urban agglomeration of gray, parallelepipedal apartment buildings, has been her entire world throughout her brief existence.
Because of this, she has no memory of a decent past, and her only dream is to leave.
The misfortunes of Lilya, betrayed first by her mother, who leaves her with her new partner, then by her aunt, and finally by Andrei, the young man who seemed to be a glimmer of a new life, but in fact only adds to her pain, forcing her from being a casual prostitute out of necessity to becoming a victim of illegal exploitation in Sweden, at the disposal of wealthy older men.
An individual shipwreck that eventually becomes an allegorical fresco, ferociously providing a detailed journey of Lilya’s entire short existence.
After she manages to escape through a window from the apartment where Andrei has kept her, she meets an ethnic Macedonian man who first lures her into his quarters and then rapes her with some of his friends.
The next day, in despair, Lilya jumps from a highway bridge in Malmö to commit suicide.
She is rushed to the hospital, where she dies of her injuries a few days later.
