Writers: Mika Gustafson and Alexander Öhrstrand
Director: Mika Gustafson
Deservedly the winner of this year’s BFI London Film Festival Sutherland Award for first feature, Paradise is Burning is a fascinating and riveting examination of childhood and loneliness. Featuring top-notch performances from the three young actors who play three sisters looking after themselves after their mother disappears, director Mika Gustafson’s film has a cinematic reach that is fresh and invigorating.
Eldest sister Laura, middle sister Mira and seven-year-old Steffi are living in a housing estate somewhere in Sweden. They are struggling to fend for themselves; Steffi keeps wetting the bed, they’ve run out of milk and washing powder, and a social worker is due to come in a week’s time to talk to their mother. These early scenes looking at working-class lives seem particularly British, lives that would interest the likes of Ken Loach or Mike Leigh or even Charlotte Regan, whose recent debut Scrapper covers similar ground.
Gustafson’s Sweden is not one we normally see on screen. The girls’ house is messy and their neighbours’ gardens are full of rubbish. Stray dogs wander the streets and gangs of girls, smoking and drinking, break into posh people’s backyards when the owners are away to make use of their pools and music systems. These girls fight and swear and shout.
But they are also loving too. When Mira has her first period (an event explored in two other Festival films, Tiger Stripes and Fancy Dance) these girls celebrate Mira’s step into womanhood with a ceremony that involves plenty of red wine. These girls are all there for each other.
However, as Laura tries to find a solution to the impending visit of the social worker, her own family unit begins to crumble. Laura has met an older woman who she thinks could impersonate her mother for the social services visit. She spends hours away from Mira and Steffi as she begins to form an odd relationship with the woman, whose own comfortable life is nevertheless empty.
Feeling neglected Steffi makes a new friend, while Mira must make her own way. Most scenes are short with the camera whirling around the girls as they tumble and embrace. In filming this camera was nicknamed the ‘dog camera’ as it is playful and unpredictable. It rushes between the sisters, weaving bonds of intimacy and trust.
Bianca Delbravo’s Laura is tough but brittle with the insouciance of teenage years. Delbravo is careful to conceal most emotions but there is a glimmer of delight when she first meets Hanna, the older woman Hanna, played by Ida Engvoll, the only familiar face in the film. Engvoll is warm and cold by turns. Hanna wants to return to a time of childhood recklessness while teenage Laura wants to be treated as an adult.
Safira Mossberg is an adorable Steffi who sings and dances with unbridled joy, while Dilvin Asaad is Mira, caught in the middle of her sisters, and caught in the middle of childhood, neither one thing or another. Asaad plays the sense of loss brilliantly as she begins to adopt a harder exterior, smoking cigarettes and hanging out with grown-ups.
The world that Gustafson and her fellow writer Alexander Öhrstrand present is a strange kind of paradise, but throughout the film as the social worker’s visit looms, there is the sense that its days are numbered. Like setting fire to an old photograph and watching it burn.
Paradise is Burning was screened at the London Film Festival 2023.
