Two teenage girls make friends at a local modeling school, where they ended up enticed by the promise of a better life, an international career, and – by extension – the prospect of breaking out of a town with no future.

The film won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival.

Film expert recommends

The feature debut of a young, 30-year-old director, previously known only for her short documentary and feature films, who swept this year’s Locarno festival with her film. Not surprisingly, Toxic, which tells a story as realistic as it is metaphorical (signaled already in the title), takes no prisoners. It tells the story of 13-year-old girls from a poor, post-Soviet, industrial no-man’s land, who were told by someone that they would be fit to be models. But it’s not just a story about the precocious and bitter adolescence of naive individuals who the system wants to exploit for its own ends. For the world depicted is equally surreal, and the real social problems are viewed through the double lenses of glasses, which, at the right angle, allow for quite a fun and trip. Toxic is not exclusively a cinema of problems such as poverty, drug addiction, attitudes to the body or the discovery of one’s sexuality, framed by ethical question marks. Yes it is about these things, but at the same time it takes these important phenomena into a somewhat psychedelic bracket. This is perhaps the film’s biggest surprise from an increasingly interesting European cinema.

• film in Lithuanian with Polish and English subtitles
• age: 16+
• screening partner: