At a time when women must fight again for control of their bodies, this affecting, fact-based, period film about a rebellious teen forced into the Sprogø Women’s Home in the 1930s, contains extra resonance. Lively Maren (charismatic new talent Emilie Kroyer Koppel) comes from an impoverished background and she’s not afraid to party hard after working a long day as a factory seamstress. But as she gains a reputation for promiscuity and the neighbors gossip, her mother lets the paternalistic Danish state take guardianship, before, as they say, she begins a life of crime. Labeled “slightly mentally deficient and antisocial” Maren is taken against her will to the island home for wayward women. There on Sprogø, where the harsh administrators aim to make the women fit to re-enter society, and the head doctor supports eugenics-based sterilization, life starts to fade from her eyes and her spirit is eventually broken. Winner, Nordic Film Prize, Goteborg Film Festival –Alissa Simon
Director Biography
Malou Reymann was born in 1988 in the Netherlands, and has a Master’s degree in Directing Fiction from the National Film and Television School in England. Her feature debut, A Perfectly Normal Family (En helt almindelig familie) (2020), debuted at the Rotterdam Film Festival. Unruly (2022) is her most recent feature.