Lilya 4-Ever Review

It’s really rare to find a film that attempts to speak for millions of people who have no real voice of their own. It’s even rarer to find a film that does an excellent job telling their story. But I think director Lukas Moodysson generally succeeds in his film, Lilya-4 Ever. He is a fairly new Swedish director, and I haven’t seen any of his other films, so I’m not sure how good they are, but I was impressed by the simplicity and realism of Lilya 4-Ever.

I should say that this film is not for everyone. It is very depressing and even disheartening, and it is definitely one of the saddest movies I’ve ever watched. But it was also eye-opening and refreshing, and didn’t have a trace of sappiness. I think this is the kind of film that more people should see because it’s not about a massive tragedy that everyone already knows about, and it doesn’t blow the story up to epic proportions. It’s just sad because the circumstances depicted are close to the truth for far too many people.

Most of the movie takes place in Estonia, probably sometime in the 1990’s. In the beginning, it depicts the life of a fairly typical sixteen year old girl living with her mother and step father in an apartment in a poor suburb. Her mother is desperate to get out of the country and make a better living, as a great many people are and were in Eastern Europe after the fall of the USSR. So, she finds a way to travel to America for work. Lilya is left behind with her aunt, but without any family members willing to take good care of her, her life quickly falls apart. She drops out of school and befriends a young street boy. Left with few options, she tries her best to scrape out a living, but ends up working in the sex trade.

This is actually a huge industry the world over, even though most Americans pay little attention to it, as it is not particularly common here. It barely resembles prostitution. Even sex workers in America have some control over their lives and who their clients are, but trading people into virtual slavery is what can happen to many women and girls in poor areas of the world who get inadvertently involved in human trafficking. Having lived in Ukraine for two years, I was particularly impressed with how realistic the characters and movie in general were. Of course, the circumstances of the characters in the movie were exceptionally bad and certainly not the norm, but I thought the general environment felt surprisingly real, and with the exception of a few scenes with particularly uncaring people, it was very realistic.

The sad reality is that probably hundreds of thousands of women from Eastern Europe alone have undergone at least a milder version of what Lilya went through. With little or no money, living in a crumbling society, and no legal way of getting out of the country, many women in developing countries are tempted to take jobs abroad as a “cleaner” or “factory worker” that they are promised by men who offer to smuggle them out of the country in exchange for what little money they have. Unfortunately, when they find themselves in a foreign country with no friends, no papers, no money, and no rights, they are in no position to challenge the people who have brought them there all along to work in another industry entirely. I didn’t know any locals in Ukraine who would talk specifically about these subjects, but they certainly acknowledged them. Having lived in a town of 7,000 people in 2006 that had a population of 16,000 at the fall of the USSR, in a country in where the total population has actually fallen by some six million in this time period, it is self evident to me that at least a few of the people who moved abroad had not found good homes in places like America or Great Britain. I can only hope they didn’t end up like Lilya.