DIRECTOR: Urska Djukic
STARRING: Jara Sofija Ostan, Mina Svajger, Stasa Popovic, Sasa Tabakovic, Natasa Burger
RUNNING TIME: 1 hr 30 minutes
LANGUAGE: Slovene
PLOT: Sixteen-year-old Lucija joins her Catholic school’s choir, where she forms a close bond with the older Ana-Maria. But during a choir retreat, Lucija’s growing attraction to a visiting restoration worker stirs jealousy, tests her friendship, and forces her to confront the boundaries between faith and desire.
GENRE: Drama
FILMING LOCATION: Cividale del Friuli, Italy
To check out all previous submissions for Slovenia, click HERE.
STARRING: Jara Sofija Ostan, Mina Svajger, Stasa Popovic, Sasa Tabakovic, Natasa Burger
RUNNING TIME: 1 hr 30 minutes
LANGUAGE: Slovene
PLOT: Sixteen-year-old Lucija joins her Catholic school’s choir, where she forms a close bond with the older Ana-Maria. But during a choir retreat, Lucija’s growing attraction to a visiting restoration worker stirs jealousy, tests her friendship, and forces her to confront the boundaries between faith and desire.
GENRE: Drama
FILMING LOCATION: Cividale del Friuli, Italy
To check out all previous submissions for Slovenia, click HERE.
FILM REVIEW:
(This review contains spoilers.)
“If you want to suffer, go ahead, but don't expect it from us."
Urska Djukic’s Little Trouble Girls is a hypnotic and quietly daring exploration of adolescence, faith, and awakening desire. Set within the cloistered world of a Catholic girls’ choir, the film follows sixteen-year-old Lucija, whose life is defined by order, devotion, and discipline. When she befriends the older and more confident Ana-Maria, Lucija finds herself drawn into a world that feels both sacred and forbidden. The film’s serene setting, a monastery nestled between Slovenia and northern Italy, becomes an apt metaphor for the emotional and spiritual boundaries that Lucija must navigate. Djukic directs with remarkable restraint, crafting a world where silence, ritual, and gesture speak louder than dialogue.
Little Trouble Girls is a triumph of atmosphere. The cinematography, with its muted colors and natural light, captures the damp stillness of convent walls and the fragility of the human body within them. The camera often stays close to the characters’ faces, creating a sense of physical and emotional proximity that makes every glance and hesitation feel deeply personal. This intimacy heightens the film’s tension, each breath, each flicker of the eye revealing more than words ever could. When a restoration worker arrives to repair the monastery’s frescoes, his presence disrupts the girls’ delicate balance of friendship and faith. Lucija’s attraction to him is never depicted as scandalous; instead, Djukic treats it as an inevitable confrontation with selfhood, a collision between curiosity and guilt. The sound design deepens this inner turbulence, using choral music and the echo of empty corridors to externalize Lucija’s inner struggle.
Much of the film’s strength lies in its ambiguity. Djukic avoids moral pronouncements, favoring a more psychological and sensory approach. The tension between Lucija and Ana-Maria, rooted in affection, envy, and repression, unfolds with painful intimacy. Scenes of singing, washing, and prayer reveal the contradictions of their environment, where purity is both celebrated and weaponized. Through its close, nearly tactile focus on faces and gestures, the film evokes the quiet claustrophobia of youth lived under surveillance, where desire becomes both dangerous and inevitable.
Little Trouble Girls is about the reconciliation between faith and desire, the moment when devotion no longer excludes the body but flows through it. Lucija’s journey ends not in rebellion but in a profound awakening. By the final scene, she seems to have made peace with her longing, her guilt, and her belief, understanding that what she feels does not separate her from faith but humanizes it. Her silence becomes an act of acceptance, her voice, once confined to the choir, finally her own. Djukic leaves us with a feeling of quiet transcendence: that true spiritual growth begins when we allow the sacred and the sensual to coexist within the same fragile heart.
(This review contains spoilers.)
“If you want to suffer, go ahead, but don't expect it from us."
Urska Djukic’s Little Trouble Girls is a hypnotic and quietly daring exploration of adolescence, faith, and awakening desire. Set within the cloistered world of a Catholic girls’ choir, the film follows sixteen-year-old Lucija, whose life is defined by order, devotion, and discipline. When she befriends the older and more confident Ana-Maria, Lucija finds herself drawn into a world that feels both sacred and forbidden. The film’s serene setting, a monastery nestled between Slovenia and northern Italy, becomes an apt metaphor for the emotional and spiritual boundaries that Lucija must navigate. Djukic directs with remarkable restraint, crafting a world where silence, ritual, and gesture speak louder than dialogue.
Little Trouble Girls is a triumph of atmosphere. The cinematography, with its muted colors and natural light, captures the damp stillness of convent walls and the fragility of the human body within them. The camera often stays close to the characters’ faces, creating a sense of physical and emotional proximity that makes every glance and hesitation feel deeply personal. This intimacy heightens the film’s tension, each breath, each flicker of the eye revealing more than words ever could. When a restoration worker arrives to repair the monastery’s frescoes, his presence disrupts the girls’ delicate balance of friendship and faith. Lucija’s attraction to him is never depicted as scandalous; instead, Djukic treats it as an inevitable confrontation with selfhood, a collision between curiosity and guilt. The sound design deepens this inner turbulence, using choral music and the echo of empty corridors to externalize Lucija’s inner struggle.
Much of the film’s strength lies in its ambiguity. Djukic avoids moral pronouncements, favoring a more psychological and sensory approach. The tension between Lucija and Ana-Maria, rooted in affection, envy, and repression, unfolds with painful intimacy. Scenes of singing, washing, and prayer reveal the contradictions of their environment, where purity is both celebrated and weaponized. Through its close, nearly tactile focus on faces and gestures, the film evokes the quiet claustrophobia of youth lived under surveillance, where desire becomes both dangerous and inevitable.
Little Trouble Girls is about the reconciliation between faith and desire, the moment when devotion no longer excludes the body but flows through it. Lucija’s journey ends not in rebellion but in a profound awakening. By the final scene, she seems to have made peace with her longing, her guilt, and her belief, understanding that what she feels does not separate her from faith but humanizes it. Her silence becomes an act of acceptance, her voice, once confined to the choir, finally her own. Djukic leaves us with a feeling of quiet transcendence: that true spiritual growth begins when we allow the sacred and the sensual to coexist within the same fragile heart.
