Set in a female choir, "Little Trouble Girls" (The original Slovenian title "What's wrong with you girl?") tells the story of juvenile mischief, female friendships, and sexual awakenings through a mixture of still compositions that suddenly switch to art-house-like montages of the inner soul. The natural landscapes of northeast Italy, where the choir travel too, merge and mix with the stone of churches and covenants to form an aesthetic equal parts visual and auditory. Sound is key to this film not only in narrative, with the everything from the choir's breathing exercises to its bellows being focused on - as well as silencing of speech.
Which aspects of female adolescence were you keen to get across on screen?
The first thing that happened to me was that I started researching the voice, the female voice. because I had the feeling and I understood when I was growing up that the female voice was always a little bit repressed. Especially I remember me when I wanted to express too much, I was always a little silenced. So I started with that.
I saw this Catholic choir sing and that gave me a big inspiration to start understanding this topic and I knew there's something I need to explore more. I even did a lot of voice rehearsals for myself to start understanding this instrument that we have and then through that I went to the body and found all this repression and these feelings of guilt and shame and the feelings of our own bodies, especially girls when we grow up, how much we want to follow rules or expectations of the society that are a bit different than what our nature is telling us.
So this was also one little conflict that I had when I was growing up and I thought it's very important to address this conflict in a film.
And what role did you want Catholicism to play in the narrative?
I didn't specifically want to criticize or anything, but that was how I was raised. Even though my parents weren't very religious or anything, I still got these rules: How good girls should be acting and how not. And I think that comes from the patriarchal society.
The other part is the spirituality, which I think is not connected to the Catholicism, but to every person and everybody has this connection with themselves. So I felt that that is also a very important part of growing up, when you really question the rules and the norms - but then you find something inside yourself that is stronger than what the society says.
And there's also almost dream or vision sequences but it contrasts a lot to the rest of the film that's quite like a lot of long takes. Why did you want to include both?
I think I used this kind of language to show something deeper inside. It's not a film that has a lot of action, a lot of story, but it's more mostly focused inside the body. What happens in one little moment in life. But to the inside world, there's a lot of things happening inside. So I used this kind of language to go inside, to tell a different story, the story of the senses, how we experience things inside. Because that's very important.
Sometimes I think we go very fast through experiences in life we don't really focus on everything that our bodys' feel. So I think it's very important to tune in, to listen to inside yourself, because there is some kind of guidance there.
Did you always want to show that through themes of lesbianism?
I don't know if I would say it like that. For me it was more like I was dealing with the concept of attraction. Because I feel that attraction and sexual energy is not just about orientation and intercourse, but it's also about the kind of energy that leads us for personal growth. Something you are attracted to doesn't mean that you are attracted for an intercourse reason. You need to explore there to understand yourself and to eventually to learn and to grow. So that was the basic idea that the extraction is actually a very important part of our body mechanism to lead us.
You talked about growth. Would you say the film is of the coming-of-age genre?
Yes, I guess so. I mean, I never thought of it like that, to put it in a genre. But if society needs that, of course, yeah: it is a moment in life of a very shy girl who starts understanding that the rules of the society are a oppressing and decides one little thing in her life.