Urska Djukic

Source: Ela Mimi Pirnar

Urska Djukic

Slovenian filmmaker Urska Djukic’s debut feature, Little Trouble Girls, made its world premiere as the opening night film of Berlinale’s new Perspectives strand, and has gone on to light up festivals including Tribeca, Karlovy Vary and now the Edinburgh International Film Festival in Scotland. 

Little Trouble Girls is about an introverted 16-year-old, played by newcomer Jara Sofija Ostan, who joins her Catholic school’s all-girls choir and experiences a sexual awakening.

Shooting took place in the summer of 2023 in Cividale del Friuli, Italy, and Ljubljana, Slovenia, with some additional filming in winter 2024.

Djukic, who co-wrote the feature with Maria Bohr, says the film was six years in the making, receiving development support along the way from the Torino Film Lab and Cannes Cinéfondation Residency.

“I began thinking of this film when I heard one of the Slovenian girls’ choirs sing for the first time,” recalls Djukic. “The power of the girls’ voices — on the verge of discovering their womanhood — moved me so deeply that I had to hold back my emotions; otherwise, I would have burst into tears in the middle of the concert. I felt that there was something important in this strong force of young female voices — voices that have so often been silenced.”

little trouble girls

Source: Spok Film

‘Little Trouble Girls’

For Djukic, a career as a filmmaker felt beyond her reach at first. But when she was 17, Maja Weiss became the first Slovenian woman to direct a feature film, with 2002 Berlinale premiere Guardian Of The Frontier, providing Djukic with a bonafide role model.

But Weiss’s achievement did not quite prove to be a watershed moment, with the film landscape in Slovenia remaining overwhelmingly male-dominated in the following decade.

“The profession felt reserved for men,” says Djukic. “I believed that, as a woman, it would be difficult to find a place as a director.”

She studied sociology, but her childhood passion for cinema did not fade. An MA in film at the Academy of Arts of the University of Nova Gorica followed, and she began making shorts to festival acclaim.

Djukic’s first short Bon Appétit, La Vie!, received the best Slovenian short award at the Slovenian Film Festival in 2016. In 2018, she co-directed The Right One, which premiered in Cannes Directors’ Fortnight 2019. Her 2021 animated documentary Granny’s Sexual Life won more than 50 prizes, including a European Film Award and a Cesar.

Djukic’s attention has now turned to her next feature, which has the working title Veronika Of Desenice, based on a real 15th century witch trial in what is now Slovenia.

Tilda Swinton and Steve Buscemi are actors with whom she is keen to work. “As for writers,” she says, “I’d love to have lunch with Margaret Atwood.”

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