Bouncing between euphoria and despair, Paradise is Burning celebrates sisterhood and mourns a childhood without parental guidance at the same time. Mika Gustafson’s film opens in the US on 23 August 2024.
There’s a touch of fantasy which occasionally jostles with reality in Paradise is Burning, which keeps this story of abandonment from becoming too heavy for an audience to handle – on the surface at least.
Sixteen-year-old Laura (Bianca Delbravo), twelve-year-old Mira (Dilvin Asaad), and seven-year-old Steffi (Safira Mossberg) are left to fend for themselves in a working-class Stockholm suburb by their mother, who they haven’t seen since Christmas. As the summer approaches they enjoy breaking into gardens with their friends to make use of empty swimming pools, but Laura has also discovered that Social Services are about to do a home visit to follow up on school absence. Laura knows that this will be the end of the play-acting and that the siblings will be taken into care, but decides not to tell her sisters.
On the one hand, the freedom of no parental control is joyous – the girls eat, sleep and do what they want without the nagging of someone at home. It’s what a teenager might dream about. And while for the younger two, it’s great, the burden of keeping the family together falls on Laura – such as organising how to get food and making sure they (and particularly the youngest Steffi) stay safe.
Each of the sisters is at a moment of transition in their lives, and Laura’s encounter with older woman Hanna (Ida Engvoll) leads her to copy her mother’s behaviour and leave the siblings alone for increasingly longer periods of time, just when they might need a guiding hand most. But Laura needs her moment of freedom too and finds a short-lived opportunity with the increasingly unsettled Hanna.
There are some touches in Paradise is Burning which appear to be lifting the story momentarily out of the reality of the situation – an image of a woman and a cat come to life, for example, and a nagging feeling that some things can’t really be as they seem (how, for example, are they paying the electricity and phone bills to keep their mobiles going?). For this viewer, these things seemed slightly unsatisfactory and disturbed the flow of the narrative. More of this, or less, might have helped to flag exactly what the purpose was, but I was left a bit bemused.
However, the film wouldn’t work as well as it does without the contributions from the three sisters. Each of the young actors is a first-time performer, and they are brilliant both together and in their own independent strands. Mika Gustafson’s direction has brought out fabulous performances from them all, and they gel together like a real family group.
Paradise is Burning took home the Sutherland Award for First Feature at last year’s London Film Festival, which is as good a recommendation as any!
Paradise is Burning opens at IFC Center NYC on 23 August, and at Laemmle Royal and Laemmle Glendale in LA on 6 September, with other cities to follow.
Bouncing between euphoria and despair, Paradise is Burning celebrates sisterhood and mourns a childhood without parental guidance at the same time. Mika Gustafson’s film opens in the US on 23 August 2024.
There’s a touch of fantasy which occasionally jostles with reality in Paradise is Burning, which keeps this story of abandonment from becoming too heavy for an audience to handle – on the surface at least.
Sixteen-year-old Laura (Bianca Delbravo), twelve-year-old Mira (Dilvin Asaad), and seven-year-old Steffi (Safira Mossberg) are left to fend for themselves in a working-class Stockholm suburb by their mother, who they haven’t seen since Christmas. As the summer approaches they enjoy breaking into gardens with their friends to make use of empty swimming pools, but Laura has also discovered that Social Services are about to do a home visit to follow up on school absence. Laura knows that this will be the end of the play-acting and that the siblings will be taken into care, but decides not to tell her sisters.
On the one hand, the freedom of no parental control is joyous – the girls eat, sleep and do what they want without the nagging of someone at home. It’s what a teenager might dream about. And while for the younger two, it’s great, the burden of keeping the family together falls on Laura – such as organising how to get food and making sure they (and particularly the youngest Steffi) stay safe.
Each of the sisters is at a moment of transition in their lives, and Laura’s encounter with older woman Hanna (Ida Engvoll) leads her to copy her mother’s behaviour and leave the siblings alone for increasingly longer periods of time, just when they might need a guiding hand most. But Laura needs her moment of freedom too and finds a short-lived opportunity with the increasingly unsettled Hanna.
There are some touches in Paradise is Burning which appear to be lifting the story momentarily out of the reality of the situation – an image of a woman and a cat come to life, for example, and a nagging feeling that some things can’t really be as they seem (how, for example, are they paying the electricity and phone bills to keep their mobiles going?). For this viewer, these things seemed slightly unsatisfactory and disturbed the flow of the narrative. More of this, or less, might have helped to flag exactly what the purpose was, but I was left a bit bemused.
However, the film wouldn’t work as well as it does without the contributions from the three sisters. Each of the young actors is a first-time performer, and they are brilliant both together and in their own independent strands. Mika Gustafson’s direction has brought out fabulous performances from them all, and they gel together like a real family group.
Paradise is Burning took home the Sutherland Award for First Feature at last year’s London Film Festival, which is as good a recommendation as any!
Paradise is Burning opens at IFC Center NYC on 23 August, and at Laemmle Royal and Laemmle Glendale in LA on 6 September, with other cities to follow.
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