“Growing up as a girl, you learn to please to be accepted”: Urška Djukić on Little Trouble Girls

Slovenian director Urška Djukić still remembers the first time she heard Little Trouble Girl, the ‘90s track by Sonic Youth on which alternative rock icons Kim Gordon and Kim Deal sing about pretending to be good to win approval, but being bad inside. She had a “rare feeling of being understood” – so much so that the song has, years later, provided the title for her debut feature, Little Trouble Girls, a vivid and sensual coming-of-age vision of the conflicting emotions of awakening desire.

“Growing up as a girl, you often collide with limiting social rules,” said Djukić in an interview on the eve of the film’s UK release. “You learn to please, to perform, just to be accepted. At the same time, you’re taught to hide your wilder, more instinctive side, because it’s seen as inappropriate. But I believe that wildness is actually where a woman’s deepest strength lies. And maybe that’s exactly why, throughout history, it’s been so heavily controlled and suppressed.”

Djukić, who was born in Slovenia’s capital, Ljubljana, and studied film in Nova Gorica on its Italian border, was hailed as an exciting breakout talent when Little Trouble Girls premiered in February. The opening night film of the Berlin International Film Festival’s new Perspectives strand, it has since enjoyed a successful run at other high-profile festivals like Karlovy Vary, before its wider release via BFI Distribution. Djukić is not an entirely new name, having made several successful shorts prior to this, including European Film Award winning animated documentary Granny’s Sexual Life (2021), co-directed with Emilie Pigeard, in which elderly Slovenian women reflect on intimacy and their younger selves.

There is no reflective distance of memory to Little Trouble Girls, which immerses us with fevered immediacy into the woozy hormonal confusion of teenage impulses and obsessions. Gauche, restless sixteen-year-old Lucija (newcomer Jara Sofija Ostan, wonderfully embodying a nervy volatility) has just joined her school’s all-girl choir. She accompanies her peers on a retreat to a convent for intensive rehearsals, under the exacting supervision of Bojan (Sasa Tabakovic), a choirmaster whose veneer of reasoned control is thin.

Between her new friend Ana-Marija (Mina Svajger), a purveyor of red lipstick whose flirtiness pushes buttons and who conspires in audacious games, and the brawny workmen busy with renovations on site, there is plenty to distract Lucija’s overactive mind from the harmonies at hand – and to knock her concentration and self-possession off, when her burning shame is activated, and her certainty over imparted ideals of devotion and faith are thrown into disarray.

“When growing up I felt some kind of guilt about my own instincts, but didn’t really understand why,” said Djukić. “Although my family was not strictly religious, my mother raised me in line with traditional Catholic ideas of what a ‘good girl’ should be. Only later did I realise that these ideas, which deal with body image and sexuality, are rather rigid. In my opinion, the concept of sinful sexuality and the general lack of education in this field is a subtle mechanism that cuts a person off from their own source of power. People who are deeply connected with their bodies are not easily led, as they trust their inner intuitive guidance more than external influences.”

While sacral roots are everywhere visible in Slovenia, which is dotted with thousands of churches for its mostly Catholic population of just two million, Djukić shot the choir getaway’s summer-dappled but cloistered world of nuns, candles, Vestal robes and Madonna statues across the border in Italy, in Cividale del Friuli. Rushed blooms of flowers in time-lapse montage and sound design that amplifies the breath are among surreal, sensorial touches that bring Lucija’s cataclysmic inner upheaval and hairtrigger sensitivity spilling forth into our sphere of perception. Singers were cast to complete the choir for the astonishing rehearsal scenes, in which crushing discipline and soaring self-expression collide in dramatic, mysterious and not fully rationalised ways.

The push-pull of religion and sex has long been a richly generative, and often provocative, territory for cinema. Djukić brings something fresh, avoiding easy sensationalism while not denying the erotic in the ecstatic. She’s quick to point out that guilt and repression are not only reserved for Catholics. “We all carry the same historical dogmas of patriarchy.”

Intuition and collaborative exploration are key for Djukić when directing. “The process grew organically out of sound, emotion, and observation,” she said. “Art and the creative process feel like something magical to me.” She feels a strong connection to filmmakers who work through improvisation, naming Mike Leigh, Valeska Grisebach, and Lucretia Martel as inspirations. “Their films achieve a striking level of realism; you believe the actors completely.”

Veronika Of Desenice is the working title for a new project that Djukić is working on, based on the first witchcraft trial in what is now Slovenia. The second wife of Frederick II, Count of Celje, was targeted for persecution by her father-in-law, after a scandalous love that crossed class lines in the fifteenth century. 

“The control of the female body is still such a crucial issue today,” said Djukić. “It’s something we have to keep talking about and keep challenging, because these rigid ideas don’t just belong to the past; they’re still used to limit and even enslave people today. Through my films, I want to confront that legacy and open a space where those silenced experiences can finally be seen and heard.” 

Little Trouble Girls is released in cinemas on 29 August and on BFI Player from 13 October.