The sixteen year old Agnes Ahlberg has been living in the small Swedish town of Åmål with her family for one year and half, but she has no friends. She secretly loves her popular school mate Elin Olsson, a girl bored with the lack of perspective of Åmål. At Agnes’s birthday party, Elin kisses her and changes their lives. —IMDb
With his first two feature efforts, Fucking Åmål (1998) and Together (2000), Swedish filmmaker Lukas Moodysson earned a strong following for his acute, gentle sense of social satire and his remarkably well-drawn and sympathetic characters. Though his third feature, the soul-shredding Lilja 4-Ever, marked a notably dark turn in terms of content for Moodysson, his sense of characterization was perhaps stronger than ever, and the stark tale of a young Russian girl forced into prostitution gained him international acclaim. A native of the South Sweden burg of Lund, Moodysson was the son of hardworking farmers who hailed from the small community of Smaland. When the opportunity arose for Moodysson’s father to study engineering in the 1960s, he relocated to the university town of Lund, funding his education with work at a local hardware store; it was there that Karl Frederik Lukas Moodysson was born in January of 1969. The future director was exposed to an early film influence at age 12 when… read more
This movie reminded me of my early teens so much. Specially the clothing and the haircuts. I even knew a girl who looked like Agnes who may have been my first girl crush. Who knows? Johan also reminds me of my first proper boyfriend, really looks like him! Really great film. One of my new favourite films I think.
My favourite coming-of-age film. I love the literal take of "coming out of the closet" too. The whole film was just perfect, and is the only film in this genre that I have seen that actually transports me back to my own adolescence, whether this is the generation its set in, or the fact that I also grew up in a small town, I'm not sure. Just perfect. I love this film a lot.