The Swedish feature film “Paradise Burning” will be showing at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival running from 11-22September2024.
Three sisters ranging from 6-16 survive in a Swedish working-class suburb without parental presence. Their drug addict mother is often absent abandoning her children. Social Services queries Laura (Bianca Delbravo) the oldest of the three sisters when can they meet with her mother to discuss some unauthorized absences from school. Should Social Services discover the absent mother good luck to the three children should they ever enter the rocky and failed more often than not land of foster care.
Laura is no saint with her fascination for breaking into flats to “poke around”, her shoplifting, her smoking and her drinking but she does what she can as a teenager supposed to be testing the rules not acting like a mother. Given the circumstances the children are thriving albeit in a bit of a cinematographic fantasy which overlooks the daily grind and is more interested in focusing on the teenage girl gang exuberance but given this is sisterhood movie what is the point of the daily grind?
Laura encounters and befriends a recent new mother Hannah who has perhaps an unnatural interest in Laura. Laura had hoped Hannah could impersonate her mother for the Social Services visit but that is not looking promising. Hannah has a puzzling interest in discovering what interests Laura and includes the two of them breaking and entering a flat. There is a brief cannabis kiss between Laura and Hannah so is this sufficient to have the film showing in a queer film festival?
Do the girls escape the Social Services dragnet? Only the doorbell knows.
A film by Mika Gustafson.
RKS 2024 Film Rating 72/100.
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