“Little Trouble Girls marks the feature directorial debut of Urška Djukić, and it has been turning heads since its world premiere in Berlin. The film brings to the screen a fresh—and yes, irreverent—take on a story of sexual awakening in a deeply religious environment, told with a striking focus on sensory and sensual experience. Now”, — write: www.hollywoodreporter.com
Now, the coming-of-age film, told from the perspective of a teenage girl, is Slovenia’s submission in the best international feature film category of the 2026 Oscars. It is also nominated for the European Discovery Award, which honors emerging filmmakers, at the European Film Awards.
The film follows Lucia, a quiet 16-year-old who joins her Catholic school’s all-girls choir and befriends Ana-Maria, a popular and flirtatious older student. During a weekend rehearsal trip to the countryside, Lucia becomes drawn to a restoration worker — an attraction that strains her relationship with Ana-Maria and unsettles the group’s fragile harmony.
Djukić, whose short film Granny’s Sexual Life won the European Film Award for best short in 2022 and the César Award for best animated short in 2023, directed Little Trouble Girls from a screenplay she co-wrote with Maria Bohr. he feature is produced by SPOK Films, with Staragara, 365 Films, Non-Aligned Films, Nosorogi and OINK as co-producers, and Sister Production as associate producer. Heretic is handling international sales
Djukić spoke with THR about crafting a film rooted in sensory experience, the challenges of exploring sexual themes on screen and what comes next in her career.
Was there any inspiration for the film or any story behind your decision to make it?
There are many inspirations from different sources, but I started to write this film when I saw a concert of a Catholic choir of young girls. They were 17 years old, and they were singing this very powerful Slovenian folk song, expressing it with their voices. In the first row, there were three priests sitting. And it was such an interesting image to me. These celibate men in the patriarchy were watching these girls expressing themselves very strongly through their voices. Usually, throughout history, these voices of females and girls were very repressed. And even my voice when I was a young girl, I remember that I was always silenced, not really encouraged to express myself very much. So that was an important starting point.
It made me really feel that there was something to explore through the film here. And so I started exploring the female voice, and then going inside the body and the senses.
I find it so interesting that you mention the senses, because Little Trouble Girls feels like it is about way more than “just” visuals.
I was mostly focusing on the senses to make this tactile experience, this sensual, sensory experience for film. So, yeah, that was my wish.
You show viewers shots of plants and flowers, among little cutaways. Was there any visual inspiration or influence for that?
A lot of the process was led by intuition. I allowed myself to have an intuitive feeling that there was something that I needed to do, even without understanding it. I knew we had to shoot a lot of flowers, but I didn’t have the idea that I would use them. They weren’t in the script.
There were many things like that. For example, there is this unrecognizable, abstract voice Lucia hears. I created that with a voice artist on set because we were experimenting, and I found it led me somewhere. And because I was working a lot as an editor before, I created a lot through editing, but also through intuition. I’d just have an inspiration when seeing the location. I just see images. And for example, when we saw this waterfall for the first time, I saw this image of women standing there and singing. And I said, “Okay, let’s do this.” So, some of the things were in the script, and some were created organically.
Actually, I didn’t go to Catholic church. My parents weren’t very religious. But this is a very strong patriarchal pattern, the ideas of what the good girl should be like. This is extremely strong. We are all sitting on the history of these Catholic rules. And that influenced me a great deal. I was also surprised. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a liberal family or a conservative family — you’re still influenced by these ideas and these rules. They’re not empowering you, they’re not helping you. They’re making you weaker in a way, they cut you off from the source of power that you have, your body. So I think it’s a very important topic to talk about. I’ve also been talking about this topic in my short films before.
Yes, I heard about your short Granny’s Sexual Life…
It’s based on a book that explores intimacy in the first half of the 20th century between men and women. And the stories that these women told were so important and also so shocking that I realized where it all comes from. And then, in this feature film, I was working on exploring the feelings of guilt and shame that are going from generation to generation, and they’re still here.
Women’s rights seem to get pushed back and attacked in various parts of the world. Do you see the film as particularly timely in that context?
Yeah, I think it’s an extremely important topic, also because now, like you say, history is repeating itself in many different parts of our lives, and it’s important to fight it and to talk about it, not to be slaves. Women throughout history, over the course of thousands of years, were slaves in this patriarchal system. And these intimate stories we never talk about. Okay, we talk about politics and society, but not about the intimacy that happens inside people’s homes.
I want to ask you about the English-language title of the film, Little Trouble Girlswhich is a musical reference. Can you talk about that a bit and what the original title, Kaj ti je deklica, means?
Well, the first title was Little Trouble Girls, inspired by the[1995song[1995song Little Trouble Girl] by Sonic Youth, which is also in the film. But in Slovenia, they didn’t let me use the English title. They wanted to have a Slovenian title, because of the Slovenian language and culture and such. So, we used the title that means “What’s up, Girl?” or “What’s Wrong With You, Girl?” This is the title of a very famous folk song that the girls are also singing in one of the rehearsals in the film.
Have you always liked the Sonic Youth song?
Yes. And when I rediscovered it when I was making this film, I realized that it is such an important song for this generation and for women, because it says that girls learn to please and to pretend in order to be accepted by society. But underneath, there is this wild nature, this destructive nature that will always be there, even if society wants us to pretend.
How did you find your star Jara Sofija Ostan, who is a film newcomer?
Do you know what you’re doing next? Will you do more features?
I don’t know why I have this creative urge inside me that is just coming out, and I feel I need to make films. So, I do have a few ideas, but one that I’m very seriously developing is also set in a monastery. But this time it’s a male monastery, a Carthusian monastery. I’m researching a story that happened on Slovenian soil when it was part of the Habsburg Empire in the 14th century. One of the first witch trials in Europe happened here. And it was a political thing, because it was about forbidden love. The interesting thing is that this woman was allegedly hiding for a very long time in a male monastery. So what I’m interested in is this very curious, strong woman. She’s pregnant at the time, and she’s hiding in a male monastery with these monks who are the gatekeepers of knowledge.
It’s a very famous story here, but when I was young, we read novels about this story in school, and all of these novels were written by men, and all of them portrayed her as a very submissive, fragile, beautiful woman. So, I want to tell it through a female perspective.