Little Trouble Girls

Urška Djukić came to fiction from documentary and animation — her short Granny's Sexual Life won the César for best animated short in 2022 — and Kaj ti je deklica is her first feature. It opened the Berlinale's Perspectives strand in 2025, the section created that year for debut features, and won the FIPRESCI Prize. Slovenia later put it forward for the Academy Award for Best International Feature.

The film sits almost entirely inside its protagonist's body. Lucia, played by the newcomer Jara Sofija Ostan, sings second soprano, does what is asked of her, and finds that a weekend away with the choir has loosened something she has no language for. Djukić shoots close and uses sound as her main instrument — breath, the mechanics of a group singing in a stone room, the abrupt silences of a religious institution — so that the film registers as sensory before it registers as narrative. Mina Švajger plays the friendship that is also a kind of pressure.

Critics were close to unanimous, with a Rotten Tomatoes score in the high nineties and a run of festival prizes that included Best Cinematography at Tribeca and the Jury Grand Prize at Les Arcs. It belongs to a small, distinguished shelf of European films about Catholic girls' education and adolescent want — Innocence, Corpus Christi, The Innocents — and it is, on the evidence of a first feature, the arrival of a genuine filmmaker.