{"id":15800,"date":"2005-03-01T16:26:18","date_gmt":"2005-03-01T16:26:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/?p=15800"},"modified":"2021-02-12T21:16:04","modified_gmt":"2021-02-12T21:16:04","slug":"lilya-4-ever-tolerating-what","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/2005\/03\/01\/lilya-4-ever-tolerating-what\/","title":{"rendered":"Lilya 4-Ever: Tolerating What?"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><cite>Lilya 4-Ever<\/cite>, Lukas Moodysson, Denmark\/Sweden, 2002, 109 minutes<\/h2>\n<p>700,000 women, according to <acronym title=\"United Nations\">UN<\/acronym> figures, are currently \u2018trafficked\u2019 around the world, forced into sexual slavery and prostitution. In the ongoing \u2018Tolerance Zones\u2019 debate, both within and outwith the <acronym title=\"Scottish Socialist Party\">SSP<\/acronym>, these figures and terms are bandied about to such an extent that it\u2019s sometimes hard to grasp the reality behind them. The film \u2018<cite>Lilya 4-Ever<\/cite>\u2019 is a very immediate, visual and graphic contribution to this sometime academic discussion.<\/p>\n<p>The director Lukas Moodyson tells the true life story of a sixteen year old \u2018trafficked\u2019 from Eastern Europe to Sweden, where she is kept imprisoned and sold for sex. The film is graphic without being lewd, and is told from the young people\u2019s view of the world. The adults in the film \u2013 both men and women &#8211; are portrayed as uncaring, untrustworthy, selfish and brutal. Any tenderness expressed is that between the two young central characters, Lilya and Volodja. Poverty is presented as the obvious source of the willingness of young people to risk a new life in the \u2018promised land\u2019 of the West. And Moodysson cleverly uses the McDonalds brand to represent the insidiousness of globalisation. Finally, in a slightly bizarre twist, the film\u2019s bleakness and hopelessness is resolved with a tragic but surreal conclusion which has echoes of Lars von Trier\u2019s film \u2018<cite>Breaking the Waves<\/cite>\u2019.<\/p>\n<p>The film is very powerful and in particular the scenes, viewed from Lilya\u2019s eye view, in which a string of men pump themselves into Lilya\u2019s listless body are absolutely unforgettable \u2013 and should be required viewing for anyone with an opinion on prostitution. Lukas Moodysson dedicated his film to <q>the millions of children around the globe exploited by the sex trade<\/q>, and has used it in Sweden to influence the recent changes in the prostitution laws there. (It is now the buyers of sex who are prosecuted, not the sellers.)<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s not an easy film to watch. But the disgust and anger it engenders will hopefully raise the profile of the campaign to stop the trafficking of women, children \u2013 and men \u2013 across the globe. It inspires anger, and we need to act on that anger. In particular, when we debate Prostitution Tolerance Zones we need to ask ourselves the question \u2018What exactly are we tolerating?\u2019 Lilya answers that exactly!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lilya 4-Ever, Lukas Moodysson, Denmark\/Sweden, 2002, 109 minutes 700,000 women, according to UN figures, are currently \u2018trafficked\u2019 around the world, forced into sexual slavery and prostitution. In the ongoing \u2018Tolerance Zones\u2019 debate, both within and outwith the SSP, these figures and terms are bandied about to such an extent that it\u2019s sometimes hard to grasp&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1861,8784],"tags":[361],"class_list":["post-15800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alienation-self-determination","category-issue-09","tag-author-linda-gibson"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"views":2305,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15800"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15800\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16417,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15800\/revisions\/16417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/republicancommunist.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}