Moodysson very loosely based this film on the life of Dangoule Rasalaite, a 16-year-old Lithuanian, who, in 1999, was being kept in a Swedish apartment against her will and forced into prostitution. To tell the rest of her fate would be to reveal what happens in the film. Suffice it to say that the movie has been used in campaigns to warn young East European women about of the real threat of human trafficking and the dangers of the sex trade. This was a relentlessly horrific viewing experience and yet so powerful and moving, I couldn’t turn it off. The entire time, I kept consoling myself with the fact that it was fiction, and it was only later that I found out that it was inspired by true events. The acting of the two leads, Oksana Akinshina as Lilya and Artyom Bogucharsky as her friend Volodya, is wonderfully on point, and the starkness of the former Soviet landscape adds to the film’s unflinching bleakness. I don’t normally go for such gruelingly masochistic “entertainment,” but this film truly touched me. Hats off to Moodysson for taking it on and for rendering it so well.