FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE Lilja 4Ever 

We know the story of Lilja from the newspaper. How a 16-year-old girl from Russia is abandoned by her mother and falls in love with a handsome stranger. Hoping for a better future, Lilja moves to Sweden, where she is imprisoned as a prostitute. Lilja is naive and innocent. We know that she is in danger. But Lilja thinks that this is necessary for her survival. The fact that the story of Lilja is not an isolated case breaks my heart all the more! Lukas Moodysson's Lilja 4ever is one of the saddest and most moving movies of all time! Lilya (Oksana Akinshina) grows up somewhere in the former Soviet Union. In a desolate prefabricated housing estate, as we do not know it as Berliners. Her best friend is called Volodya (Artyom Bogucharsky) and has to play basketball with a can because he doesn't have a ball. Lilja's mother confesses to her daughter that she is engaged again. Her husband would take her to America, but Lilja couldn't be the same. The daughter is to follow. The mother is heartless. A woman born in a society as cold as it is desperate. The scene in which she leaves Lilja and the daughter runs behind the car, screaming, I could never forget again. I have to think about it and feel a dumpling in my throat. The moment Lilja lives alone at home, her aunt comes to see her. She throws the child out; from now on Lilja is "allowed" to live in her aunt's barrack. Is there a better environment somewhere? Anyway, Lilja won't find them. Instead she is having sniff parties with her friends. Volodya also lives on the street since his father threw him out. He talks about sex, as children do, and Lilja adopts the six-year-old like a big sister. Her way into prostitution doesn't surprise us. Without money for food... 

FREE ON CINEGEEK.DE Asghar Farhadi - About Elly 

One of Asghar Farhadi's guiding themes is to challenge sexual politics in contemporary Iran. Perhaps that is what makes his films so disturbing? But it is also what distinguishes him from the great directors of Iran who began their careers twenty years earlier. So you will find the role models of About Elly here with us in Europe. Do you still remember Roman Polanski's very first feature film? Or Michelangelo-Antonioni's "L'Avventura"? What these films had in common was that they closely observed the dynamics within a group. How does something like group guilt arise? Here it is a circle of friends from the Iranian middle class. They all come from Tehran. Together with their children they went to the sea. A weekend vacation. It was the lively Sepideh (Iran's biggest star Golshifteh Farahani) who invited Elly (Taraneh Alidoosti). No one in the group knows Elly any closer. She is the teacher of her children, that's it. Of course, Sepideh had something in mind and that was to set Elly up. Perhaps to the recently divorced Ahmad (Shahab Hosseini), who has just returned from a business trip from Germany? Elly and Ahmad even have a longer conversation with each other. But the story won't be that straightforward. It strikes a right angle. The group giggles, people talk about Elly's forthcoming wedding. Even Sepideh is involved and we feel uncomfortable. We - the audience - witness something unpleasant. All this seems to go beyond mere blasphemy. Elly leaves the room. There is a crisis and then Elly just disappears. Without a trace. Ellie is just gone. Now all the lies and secrets that exist beneath the surface come out. Elly's bizarre disappearance is said to have had repercussions... And we're already in the middle of a major psychogram!

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