Little Trouble Girls

Catholic school choir practice becomes the catalyst for a teenage girl’s sexual awakening in this lush, emotionally resonant coming-of-age story. Not long after naive 16-year-old Lucia joins her Slovenian Catholic school’s all-girl choir, she’s taken under the wing of fellow alto Ana Maria, an extroverted senior student. Queen bee Ana Maria and her popular group enlighten Lucia on the essentials of girlhood that their strict religious education doesn’t cover: they try on lipstick, practise kissing and compare their experiences of puberty (although Lucia shyly admits that her own period hasn’t started yet). When the girls’ nascent desires come to a head on a weekend trip for intensive choir rehearsals, their precarious adolescent friendship is thrown off balance. Taking its title from a Sonic Youth song and taking home the Perspectives sidebar’s FIPRESCI Prize at the 2025 Berlinale, this sensual feature debut from award-winning filmmaker Urška Djukić gives us a fresh, frank feminine perspective on coming of age. Surreal imagery, verdant time-lapse photography and evocative sound design plunge us into the heady confusion of Lucia’s blossoming sexuality, inevitably entangled in Catholic guilt, social initiation rites, hormonal urges and crises of faith. “There’s an airy delicacy here that invites comparisons to early Céline Sciamma, but with its own raw, restless edge.” – Variety