Lilya 4-ever

Lilya 4-ever (Swedish: Lilja 4-ever) is a 2002 Swedish tragedy film, mostly spoken in Russian, written and directed by Lukas Moodysson which was released in Sweden on 23 August 2002. It depicts the tragic downward spiral of Lilja Michailova, played by Oksana Akinshina, a teenage girl in post-Soviet Russia whose mother abandons her to move to the United States. The story is loosely based on the true case of Danguolė Rasalaitė, and examines the issue of human trafficking and sexual slavery.

The film received positive reviews both in Sweden and abroad. It won five Guldbagge Awards including Best Film, as well as was nomination for Best Film and Best Actress at the European Film Awards.

The film begins with a girl running towards a motorway bridge. When the girl turns around, the film introduces the audience to Lilya Michailova, an adolescent girl who has recently been badly beaten. The film then reveals her past.

Lilya lives with her mother in a run-down apartment block in an unnamed former republic of the Soviet Union. Lilya's mother tells her they are emigrating to the United States with the mother's new boyfriend, but instead, she abandons Lilya in the care of her aunt while she and the boyfriend move to America. The aunt moves herself into the larger, nicer flat Lilya than her mother had lived in while forcing Lilya to move into a smaller, squalid apartment.

A subsequent succession of humiliations and miseries are heaped upon Lilya. Her best friend Natasha encourages her to join her in prostitution, but Lilya declines. When money is discovered in Natasha's possession, she lies and says the money belongs to Lilya, whose reputation is subsequently ruined in the community and at school. This culminates in Lilya being raped by a group of boys she knows. She ultimately has to become a prostitute to support herself.

Meanwhile, Lilya forms another close, protective friendship with a younger boy named Volodya, who is physically abused by his alcoholic single father. She buys Volodya a basketball, but his father punctures it with a pair of scissors. She then meets a young man, Andrei, who becomes her boyfriend and convinces her to move to Sweden, where he says she will have a better life. After arriving in Sweden, she is instead met by a pimp named Witek who takes her to a nearly empty apartment where he imprisons and rapes her. Lilya is then forced to perform sexual acts for a large number of clients.

Despondent over the departure of his only friend, Volodya commits suicide, his soul taking the form of an angel. In his new guise, Volodya comes to Lilya to watch over her and says being in heaven is really good but he wishes he'd stayed alive for longer. On Christmas Day, he transports Lilya to the roof of the apartment building where they lived and, deeply regretting having killed himself, gives her the world as a present, but Lilya rejects the gift because the world is cold and not that good. After an escape attempt, Lilya is violently beaten by her pimp, but she manages her escape when he forgets to lock the door to the apartment he imprisoned her in. Lilya panics when she sees a policewoman pull up outside a gas station (Witek had lied to her that if she tried to escape, the police would deport her back to her country and his partners would find and kill her there) and runs through the streets of Malmö before stopping on a bridge and crying tears of exhaustion and defeat. With the story arriving full circle to the scene at the beginning of the film, Lilya ignores Volodya's angel as he begs her to stop and jumps from the bridge overpass to her death.

The film's conclusion presents two different endings. One version shows Lilya being sent back in time after killing herself to when she made the decision to go to Sweden with Andrei. However, this time she rejects Andrei's offer, and she and Volodya are shown to presumably live happier lives. In the final scene, Lilya and Volodya are both angels happily playing basketball on the roof of a tenement building.