- Sixteen-year-old Lilja and her only friend, the young boy Volodja, live in Russia, fantasizing about a better life. One day, Lilja falls in love with Andrej, who is going to Sweden, and invites Lilja to come along and start a new life.
- While waiting for her mothers reply to take her to the USA, Lilya idles the time away smoking, drinking and having fun with her, too, outcast friend Volodya. In time, the chance of a new life becomes non-existent; her life is going nowhere. Meeting a young man, she then finds a plane ticket in her hand and a new life in Sweden: a job, an apartment and prospects. All is not what it seems. There shall be work, there shall be housing and there shall be no escape. This is the stark, frank and disturbing vision of the life of a young victim of the underground sex trade and in all its tone of realism of abject poverty, despicable actions and of wanting to show that dreaming of a better life is not a crime but that life can shatter the illusion of a happy ending.—Cinema_Fan
- Lilya lives in poverty and dreams of a better life. Her mother moves to the United States and abandons her to her aunt, who neglects her. Lilya hangs out with her friends, Natasha and Volodya, who is suicidal. Desperate for money, she starts working as a prostitute, and later meets Andrei. He offers her a good job in Sweden, but when Lilya arrives her life quickly enters a downward spiral.—yusufpiskin
- Somewhere in a grim part of the former Soviet Union, sixteen-year-old Lilya is forced to fend for herself when her mother abandons her to live with her lover in the United States. Having no one to turn to, except for her only friend, the eleven-year-old boy, Volodya, Lilya daydreams about a brighter future, and Andrei, the handsome young visitor from Sweden whom she met in a bar. Indeed, compassionate and considerate Andrei seems to be the bee's knees, and as he talks wide-eyed Lilya into moving in with him to Malmö, offering her work and shelter, somehow, her fantasy starts to take shape. But, in a world rife with social fragmentation, false promises, humiliation, and deceit, do dreams come true?—Nick Riganas
- In the former Soviet Union, sixteen year old Lilja is very happy, because her mother is moving to the USA with her boyfriend. However, Lilja is left alone, without money or family in a very poor apartment. She spends her time with her only friend, the rejected boy Volodya. Lilja begins to prostitute in a nightclub to survive, and she meets a young man, Andrei, who seduces her and invites Lilja to move with him to Sweden with a promise of a job and lodging. When she arrives in Sweden, reality is not exactly as dreamed.—Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
- The film starts with a figure running despreately towards a motorway bridge. A factory is seen in the background, billowing out smoke to a soundtrack of Mein Hertz Brennt by Rammstein. The figure turns around and we are introduced to Lilya (Oksana Akinshina), who has recently been badly beaten.
The movie is about Lilya's past.
Lilya lives a fairly bleak life with her mother in a run down apartment block in a poor town in an unnamed former republic of the Soviet Union. Lilya is a normal teenage girl albeit poor and pretty impoverished. Lilya's mother (Lyubov Agapova) informs Lilya that they are emigrating to the US with her new boyfriend. At the last minute, Lilya is left behind in the care of her aunt Anna (Liliya Shinkaryova). She is forced to move into a dirty flat (whilst her aunt moved into the bigger and nicer flat that Lilya and her mother used to live in) is just the beginning and a succession of miseries are thrust upon Lilya. Lilya's best friend encourages her to join her in prostituting herself for some extra cash but Lilya decides not to. However, when the friend's father finds money made from prostitution, the friend claims that she was the one sat at the bar whilst Lilya was out sleeping with men for the money. Not only is Lilya's reputation at home ruined but the story begins to spread throughout the school. Now abandoned, Lilya has to turn to prostitution to help her get money together. One glimmer of hope comes in the form of Volodya (Artyom Bogucharskiy), who she forms a close friendship with. He is also abused and rejected by his alcoholic father. Lilya buys him a basketball with the money earned from her prostitution that week but Volodya's father pops it. Lilya's hope is once again reignited in the form of Andrei (Pavel Ponomaryov) who becomes her boyfriend and offers her a job in Sweden.
After arriving in Sweden, Lilya is introduced to her future 'employer' (in reality, he is a pimp) and taken to a nearby empty apartment where he imprisons her. Lilya is then raped by the pimp and forced to perform sexual acts on all of the clients. All the abuse is seen from Lilya's point of view.
Meanwhile, back in the former Soviet Union, Volodya commits suicide seemingly devastated that Lilya left him to his fate. In the form of an angel, Volodya appears before Lilya and transports her to the roof on Christmas Day where he gives the world as a present. Lilya finds it cold and unwelcoming. After one escape attempt from the apartment, Lilya is brutally beaten by her pimp but manages to escape again. Finally, she reaches the bridge and much to the distress of Volodya (who regrets killing himself), she jumps off and commits suicide as a continuation from the beginning scene.
Lilya and Volodya are seen as angels playing basketball on the roof, safe from everything the world can throw at them.
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