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Lilya 4-ever (Swedish: Lilja 4-ever) is a 2002 crime drama film written and directed by Lukas Moodysson, which was released in Sweden on 23 August 2002. It depicts the downward spiral of Lilja Michailova, played by Oksana Akinshina, a girl in the former Soviet Union 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 nominated for Best Film and Best Actress at the European Film Awards. Plot The film begins with a figure running towards a motorway bridge. When the figure 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 and 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 escapes when he forgets to lock the door and imprison her inside the apartment. 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 who were on his payroll would kill her) and runs through the streets of Malmo before stopping on a bridge and crying tears of exhausion 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. Cast Oksana Akinshina as Lilya Michailova Artyom Bogucharsky as Volodya Lyubov Agapova as Lilya's mother Liliya Shinkaryova as Anna, Lilya's aunt Elina Benenson as Natasha Pavel Ponomaryov as Andrei Tomasz Neuman as Witek Anastasiya Bedredinova as neighbour Tõnu Kark as Sergei Nikolai Bentsler as Natasha's boyfriendProduction Writing and pre-production The script was loosely based on the life of Danguolė Rasalaitė, a 16-year-old girl from Lithuania whose case had made headlines in Sweden in 2000. A male acquaintance helped Rasalaitė travel to Sweden with the promise of a job in Malmö. When she arrived, a man referred to as "the Russian," who would become her pimp, took her passport and told her she would have to repay him 20,000 SEK (US$2410 in 1999; $4230 today) for travel expenses and she was forced to prostitute herself for the next month. She escaped from the apartment where she was being held in the rough suburb of Arlöv, moved to Malmö and after three months, the day after she had been raped by her boyfriend and two other men, jumped from a bridge on 7 January 2000 and died three days later in hospital. Three letters she was carrying with her unravelled the story. The screenplay was originally supposed to be deeply religious, with Jesus being a prominent character, walking next to Lilja throughout the story. Moodysson wrote the script in Swedish and then had it translated into Russian.Production was led by Moodysson's usual studio Memfis Film. Co-producers were Film i Väst, Sveriges Television, and Zentropa. Financial support was provided by the Swedish and Danish Film Institutes as well as Nordisk Film- & TV-Fond. The budget was 30 million SEK.During the casting period, Moodysson and the crew interviewed "something like 1000" young applicants for the leading roles. The actors had to improvise on a scenario where they had been grounded and were trying to convince their mother to let them go out. While Artyom Bogucharsky had no previous acting experience, Oksana Akinshina had already starred in Sergei Bodrov, Jr.'s 2001 crime film Sisters. Moodysson has commented Akinshina as "[not] exactly what I had imagined. She is better than I imagined but different, somehow." Filming and post-production As Moodysson recalls, filming took "something like 40 days" to finish in total. Outdoor scenes set in the former Soviet Union were shot in Paldiski, Estonia, a former nuclear submarine training centre for the Soviet Navy. Swedish exteriors were filmed in Malmö and studio scenes in Trollhättan. Interpreters had to be present for the Russian actors to be able to understand Moodysson, who in turn had to direct based on emotional impression from the actors' intonation rather than the words. When the lines didn't sound well he would ask the actors to drop the script and improvise. One of the interpreters was Alexandra Dahlström, the star from Moodysson's debut feature Show Me Love. Dahlström, whose mother is of Russian descent, also served as assistant director, which the producers held as an advantage since she was .... Discover the Oleg Morgunov popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Oleg Morgunov books.

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