There hasn’t been a film that sent me to tears, I mean real tears than this– Lilya 4-Ever, a 2002 Russian film produced by Swedish Director Lukas Moodysson.
Russian girls have been stigmatised with the stereotype of prostitutes, but this film is an eye-opener. Loathing at Russian “whores” (a very denigrating label) comes from utter ignorance. Lilya (Oksana Akinshina), a 16-year-old Russian girl abandoned by her mother to live in excruciating poverty, can open your heart and soul to commisserate and to beg for justice. She epitomises the debacle faced by many young vulnerable women caught in the sex slave trade and women trafficking. Innocence sparks in her eyes. She does believe in God and guardian angels, but she’s also capable of being disillusioned from her pure faith when she realises she’s betrayed.
She has only one friend, an 11-year-old boy named Volodya (Artyom Bogucharsky). They have nothing but their friendship. Unloved and abandoned by their own families, they share a life amid the most inhuman condition of severe poverty in a dreary town “somewhere in Russia.” But Volodya ended his own life when Lilya was duped by her “boyfriend” to leave Russia for Sweden with the promise of finding a better life. What else is left when the only one he’s got is gone.
The racket is all-too-familiar. As soon as she arrived in Sweden, the trafficker demanded to hand in her passport to guarantee she couldn’t flee. She became a commodity for sex trade–pumped by several men day in and day out. These men are ugly, dirty, and old.
Volodya visited her quite often in her dreams and hallucinations–foreshadowing she would soon join him. She’s got the chance to finally flee when her trafficker forgot to lock the door. She escaped, ran amok along the unfamiliar streets–just anywhere, then jumped from a bridge into her tragic death.
The film did not show the ramification of justice and redemption for Lilya which undelines the bleakness and hopelessness in addressing the issue of women’s trafficking in Russia.
