Two teenage girls (Embla Ingelman-Sundberg, Aviva Wrede) are backpacking through Europe, but an incident in Poland changes everything.

In her directing debut, Fanny Ovesen was inspired by personal experiences and frequently finds the right tone in her portrait of young people discovering the world on their own for the first time. Partying and sex is a natural part of it, and there’s a lot of credibility in how something that initially seems confusing and a little unclear to one of the girls slowly affects her the way only one thing can: sexual abuse.

The two leads are very good as friends who differ from each other, but remain loyal in spite of a few hiccups.

2025-Sweden-Norway. 98 min. Color. Written and directed by Fanny Ovesen. Cast: Embla Ingelman-Sundberg (Laura), Aviva Wrede (Alex), Oscar Lesage (Lucas), Odin Romanus, Filip Zareba, Lukasz Hecman. 

Trivia: Original title: Leva lite.

Last word: “I struggled to strike the balance between darkness and light. We explore issues like consent, grey areas and boundaries, and some of the feedback I got from the backers aimed to push the story into a classical, very self-destructive abuse narrative. Personally, I wanted a story of growth in sexual identity and the reclaiming of one’s body. It’s not too dark, but I still wanted the film to be felt. I have no wish to denigrate anyone in the story or to moralise. Rather, I want them to come across as complex, the men and the women alike. In that respect, yes, it’s a humanistic film.” (Ovesen, Cineuropa)