Lilya 4-ever

Lukas Moodysson had made two warm, funny films — Show Me Love and Together — when he made this one, and Swedish audiences who arrived expecting a third were not prepared. Lilja 4-ever swept the Guldbagge awards in 2003, took the Nordic Council Film Prize, and was screened to parliaments and police forces across Europe as an argument about trafficking.

Oksana Akinshina, sixteen at the time, plays Lilja, abandoned in an unnamed former Soviet republic when her mother leaves for America with a boyfriend. Her only company is Volodya, an eleven-year-old with nowhere else to go, played by Artyom Bogucharsky. Moodysson shoots the estate in handheld grey and scores the film with Rammstein's Mein Herz brennt, a combination that sounds crass in description and is devastating in practice.

The film is genuinely hard to watch and has never pretended otherwise; critics who admired it said so while warning readers. Two decades on it holds 4.18 on Letterboxd across 255,000 ratings, and it remains the reference point for European cinema about trafficking — the film every later attempt gets measured against. Moodysson has never made anything else quite like it, and by his own account did not want to.