‘My First Love’ review: A disabled student fights prejudice in fierce Norwegian debut

Dir: Mari Storstein. Norway. 2025. 88mins

Nineteen-year-old Ella (Marie Flaatten) leaves her protective family home in rural Norway for university. Like everyone else, she drinks, flirts and parties during freshers’ week and spends the night with a pretty boy with a guitar and a big smile. Ella, however, is disabled, and this bright, charming teenager realises with a shock that – due to bureaucracy, disparities in municipal support and internalised prejudices – the freedoms others take for granted are not always easily available to people like her.

Storstein takes an unflinching, matter-of-fact approach

Debuting in Tallinn, the feature film debut from disabled filmmaker Mari Storstein is a delicately observed coming-of-age picture and a fierce piece of disability rights advocacy. Although aspects of the filmmaking can feel unvarnished at times – the score, for example, is blandly generic – the messaging is undeniably powerful.

Storstein’s previous work includes the short documentary Letter for Jens, which won at the Norwegian Documentary Film Festival, and 2017 series Siblings, about families with disabled children. She is a vocal critic of the lack of on-screen disability representation in the Nordic countries, and My First Love is a step towards redressing the balance. A story about the challenges faced by a disabled woman, made with the benefit of Storstein’s lived experience, it makes for eye-opening and frequently enraging viewing. Further festival screenings are likely, and the picture could prove to be a useful tool for disability activists. 

With the support of her parents and backing from the municipality where she lives, Ella has always enjoyed a degree of autonomy. The local government has funded the support workers that she needs for daily life, and Ella has thrived academically. But it’s time for the next step, and Ella hopes to move into a self-contained flat when she attends university in Lillehammer, which falls under a new municipal jurisdiction.

Yet the Commune of Lillehammer rejects her request for support workers, instead allocating her a place at a residential institution. The staff in this rather sterile building are caring, but there’s a one-size-fits-all approach to disability which shows no awareness of individual needs – or of individuality in the first place. The schedule is constructed around the convenience of the staff above all else. Ella might be embarking on a university education, but, along with every other client in the residential unit, she is expected to abide by a 9pm bedtime curfew. 

It’s an insultingly infantilising system. Another resident who befriends Ella has to hide his cache of sweets because the care workers ration them (brightly offering him carrots sticks as an alternative). So when Ella sneaks her boyfriend into her bed and the pair are discovered the next morning, it sends the staff into something of a spin. A powerful shot rests on Flaaten’s expressive face as she inadvertently eavesdrops on a heated meeting in which she is discussed as a procedural problem, rather than as a young woman who is perfectly capable of giving informed consent to sexual activity. 

Storstein takes an unflinching, matter-of-fact approach to showing the daily indignities that Ella faces. A scene in which a visibly flustered male carer struggles to cope with a sanitary towel is genuinely shocking. You feel for Ella when, in a wrenching scene towards the end of the film, she stops patiently and reasonably talking and just screams out her lungs in frustration.