Alumni
LITTLE TROUBLE GIRLS / Slovenia
URŠKA DJUKIĆ
Urška was born in 1986 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. She studied film and video art at the Academy of Arts in Nova Gorica. Her first professional short film Bon AppĂ©tit, La Vie! (2016) won the Best Short Film Award at the Festival of Slovenian Film. In 2018, she was invited to participate at SEE Factory – southeast Europe, a joint project for young directors curated by Quinzaine des RĂ©alisateurs and Sarajevo Film Festival. There she co-directed a short film The Right One that was presented in Cannes in 2019. For the development of her first feature film, Urška was selected for the 39th session of CinĂ©fondation La RĂ©sidence du festival de Cannes 2019/20. By combining live-action, animation, and other techniques, Urška creates hybrid visual narratives and is especially focused on exploring topics of contemporary womanhood.
SYNOPSIS
Lucija, quiet and shy 15-year-old girl, enters the prominent Ljubljana’s Catholic high-school. If she meets her mother’s expectations about the grades, she will be awarded summer holidays at her aunt in Paris – a dream she has been having for years. Never having been practicing music, Lucija is surprised to be invited to join the school’s prominent girls’ chamber choir – a privilege offered to only the most talented first-year students. In the choir, Lucija meets the second year’s most popular and charismatic girl, Ana-Marija. After an intensive singing weekend at the convent, the two become friends. Lucija starts noticing that after each choir rehearsal, she gets overwhelmed by intense erotic sensations, which she soon cannot control anymore. She starts having vivid fantasies of men she meets and starts experimenting with her body. However, in the catholic environment, sexual fantasies are considered inappropriate, even sinful. Confused and ashamed about herself, Lucija shares her fantasies with Ana-Marija, who is sexually more experienced and daring. Ana-Marija offers Lucija to give her some lessons so that she will know how to behave in real situations. Despite her mother’s warnings about canceling her summer holidays, Lucija grows more and more rebellious.
DIRECTOR'S STATMENT
In my teenage years, I had vivid sexual fantasies. I wrote texts and poems about them but kept them a secret as I felt ashamed about these impulses. Even though my family isn’t very religious, my mother always respected traditional values and raised me as a Catholic “good girl”. Later on, when I started researching the history of women’s sexuality, I came to the conclusion that Cristian values are utterly clumsy when it comes to sexuality. I read testimonies of elderly women from the rural parts of Slovenia, in which they shared details about their intimate life and the sexual practices as they experienced them in the first half of the 20th century. The idea of female sexuality had been indivisibly associated with sin throughout history, and fragments of this mindset are still present in our contemporary society. In Good Girl, I will dig into the feelings of guilt and shame as part of restrictive mechanisms that dictate people’s behavior on a subconscious, unreflected level. The sacral music will present a gateway for the main character to express her often contradicting emotions and the intense sensual experience will make her begin questioning the established morals and values, and shape the need to search for her own.
Producer:Â SPOK FILMS (SI)
Co-Producers:Â Nosorogi (SI), SISTER Productions (FR), Antitalent (HR), STARAGARA I.T. (IT)
Funding:Â RE-ACT Development Funding, Slovenian Film Center Production Support
Training and co-production markets:Â Cannes Cinefondation Residence, Torino Film Lab FeatureLab