Swedish film critic Annika Gustafsson explores how young girls are taking centre stage in European family films and how girls grow and mature through crises in two brilliant coming-of-age dramas.
The stop-motion animation Olivia and the Invisible Earthquake (L’Olivia i el terratrèmol invisible, Spain, Chile, France, Belgium, Switzerland 2025), directed by Irene Iborra, takes home Malmö City’s Children’s Film Award at BUFF, the long-running festival’s top honour. A worthy winner with certain traits in common with several of the eight entries in the Best Children’s Film competition, and not only there but also in the Best Youth Film competition. Here, delightfully, girls and teenage girls take centre stage after stories about boys have dominated international children’s film for many years.
Twelve-year-old Olivia lives with her little brother Tim and her unemployed mother, an actress whose attempts to land roles in adverts have come to nothing. The father exists only in the siblings’ dreams. Incidentally, the festival’s theme for 2026 is Dreams and Nightmares. When the mortgage cannot be paid, the family is evicted and offered a run-down flat in a block of flats for people in financial distress. To ease the painful changes for Tim, Olivia pretends that everything is part of a horror film she is filming on her mobile.
This fundamentally socially realistic drama is characterised by an unusually apt visual style, as Olivia’s emotions take shape like cracks in the walls, floors, ground – indeed, everything around her. She even falls into the sea where a menacing shark is swimming about. Time and again, she is on the verge of losing her footing, both literally and metaphorically. A brilliant, effective visual language.
But a children’s film must not be too dark, even when it depicts real difficulties such as unemployment and refers to the crisis in the European housing market. Light and hope must also be offered to the young audience. Olivia and Tim discover creative, supportive people in their neighbourhood who gather to demonstrate against the current housing market, chanting the old political slogan “no pasarán”, commonly used in the fight against fascism during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939. The story is given a valuable historical dimension, unusual in contemporary children’s films but excellent for teachers to discuss in class, as BUFF’s main daytime audience consists of school classes from Malmö and surrounding municipalities.
Similarly, in the feature film Mira, directed by Marie Limkilde, certain elements of animation are used to visualise and emphasise the emotional states of the twelve-year-old protagonist, Mira. These appear primarily when she confides in her diary. The film is based on three different graphic novels by Sabine Lemire and Rasmus Bregnhøi.
Mira, played with believability and nuance by debutante Ellen Edith Pultz-Hansen, lives with her single mother in central Copenhagen, a setting beautifully captured with a strong sense of place. Mira prefers to spend her free time with her friends Louis and Naja, who collect scrap from bins and create fun works of art. But life on social media takes up a large part of their existence, something that becomes particularly clear when Beate joins the class. She has many followers on her Instagram account, where she talks about make-up, boys and falling in love. Naja suddenly starts favouring Beate and her clique, to which Mira is not admitted because she has not yet been in love.
Marie Limkilde convincingly weaves together the friendship crisis Mira is going through, alongside recurring questions about her unknown biological father. Her mother is constantly dating new men, which only intensifies her daughter’s musings on the nature of love. A firm, secure anchor in her life is her stable grandmother.
In Mira, the multifaceted screenplay, cinematography and acting merge into a seamless, well-crafted work that reflects a contemporary reality recognisable to many families and, not least, a young audience. The school screening during BUFF clearly demonstrated the film’s ability to engage.
Mira offers a serious, exciting and at the same time entertaining exploration of the adult world’s relationship with the younger generation – in other words, a universal theme. On the surface, the film lacks the sharp social critique found in Olivia and the Invisible Earthquake, but the more Mira sinks into the viewer’s consciousness, the more the story grows.
I leave BUFF convinced of the potential – both in terms of content and artistry – that still exists within children’s and youth cinema. During the 1970s and early 1980s, innovative, bold Swedish works were found primarily within children’s cinema, with directors such as Suzanne Osten and Marie-Louise Ekman. A nostalgic era to remember and central to BUFF, which began in 1984.
Annika Gustafsson
©FIPRESCI 2026