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Several young girls wearing skimpy clothes sit together against a blue wall.

Toxic Akiplėša

  Saulė Bliuvaitė

  Lithuania     99 minutes

Synopsis

Thirteen-year-old Marija has trouble fitting into the gray industrial town where she lives with her grandmother. She begins to form a tentative and volatile bond with rebellious peer Kristina, and the two enroll in a local modeling school that promises its pupils the chance of a glamorous life far away from their bleak and isolated existence. Both girls are told they show potential, but the financial and physical demands of the school encourage them to come up with increasingly extreme and dangerous ways to conform their young bodies to impossible standards of beauty.

Toxic is an aptly titled coming-of-age tale set amidst contaminated physical and social landscapes. At its center is two young women’s exploration of, in the words of director Saulė Bliuvaitė, “the body as a project, currency, an object of desire, the body as a source of pain and magic.”

 Lithuanian, English with subtitles

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Film Credits

  •   Giedrė Burokaitė
  •   Saulė Bliuvaitė
  •   Ignė Narbutaitė
  •   Vytautas Katkus
  •   Vesta Matulionytė, Ieva Rupeikaitė, Giedrius Savickas, Vilma Raubaitė, Eglė Gabrėnaitė
  •   Gediminas Jakubka
  •   Juste Michailinaite
  •   Akis Bado
  •   https://btafilms.com/toxic/

Sponsors

New Directors Program Patron

Robert and Penelope Steiner Family Foundation