A trio of charmingly troublesome youngsters face adolescent transformations in Swedish director Mika Gustafson’s debut narrative feature, Paradise Is Burning. The bond of sisterhood is sturdy between 16-year-old Laura (Bianca Delbravo), 12-year-old Mira (Dilvin Asaad) and seven-year-old Steffi (Safira Mossberg), but one call from social services asking about their absent mother throws into peril their summer of truancy and breaking into posh houses to swim in their pools.

Balancing working-class social realism with colourful, dream-like visuals, Paradise Is Burning presents a story in two parts. The first, of carefree adolescence when young people are left to run wild; the second is a tale of transformative maturity where the harshness of adulthood arrives with colossal force. With sisterhood at the forefront, Gustafson’s mesmerizing portrait of fleeting youth is distinctly boisterous but grounded. Childhood imagination and hard truths are placed side by side though neither overpowers the other when Gustafson’s camera pushes close.

After the Orizzonti jury of the 80th Venice International Film Festival awarded Gustafson with Best Director, Paradise Is Burning screened at the First Feature Competition strand at the 2023 BFI London Film Festival. Writer-director Mika Gustafson and co-writer Alexander Öhrstrand spoke with Projektor ahead of their UK screening, about crafting the distinct narrative nuances of young womanhood and how their childhood memories helped inspire the film.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Projektor: The boyhood coming-of-age story is explored time and time again but we’re now in a wave of young women at the centre of these stories. What was it about these girls in particular that made you want to tell this story?

Mika Gustafson: As you said, I’ve seen a lot of movies [going] from boy to man, it’s almost a cliché. I’ve seen a lot of good films in that genre but I haven’t seen many coming-of-age stories with girls. When we wrote the script, I really wanted girls to become more complex characters, to be strong and vulnerable at the same time.

Alexander Öhrstrand: For a long time in movies, women were vulnerable and scared. Then came this wave of superheroes where not even kryptonite could hurt them—but [they’re] also not human beings.

Gustafson: When we were writing we’d sometimes change [the character’s] gender. It was a really good technique to find characters that are human beings. I was missing stories about girlhood and becoming a human being… I don’t want to say becoming a woman. I wanted to make them free from gender. Also, even though they are young, I really wanted [the characters] to have an inner life and an existential world. What is the conflict for a 12-year-old? It should be as existential as [for] a grown-up character. I really hope that an old man could see himself in Mira, for example.

The film rests on this brilliant trio of actors playing characters who convey this beautiful bond. How did you craft chemistry between them on the page and while shooting?

Gustafson: In the script, for the scenes between siblings, we were talking about it being a love story and then a break-up. If you’re a sibling, you need to develop on your own. That’s why it was interesting to have the girls have scenes on their own. They have this secret and they’re really close, but at the same time they have their own lives and they have to grow up and grow apart. That’s almost like a relationship when you have to break apart and let each other go.

Öhrstrand: In a certain way, you can write chemistry because of the conflict in the scene. We trained the girls for several months and prepared them for what Mika’s view of good acting is, and how you prepare for that. We also went to Brazilian jujitsu with these girls so they could wrestle together.

Gustafson: Alex is a writer and I’m a director, and when we write together we’re often an actor and a director in the process. When we talk about natural dialogue and how [characters] move in the room, it’s nice we have these different backgrounds.

The cinematic world is an art form of its own but connected to others.

Following your first feature, Silvana, how did your documentary filmmaking experience inform your approach to writing and directing this story?

Gustafson: I’m educated in fiction from film school, and the documentary that I did was [made] during and after film school. The documentary, Silvana, is about rapper Silvana Imam. When I ran into her she reminded me of the characters that I wanted to write about. It was something about her energy, not excusing herself and looking for freedom. I really believe in the artist’s process and we were going around and collecting a lot of materials. It’s very important to me to find authenticity. But at the same time, the cinematic world is an art form of its own but connected [to others]. 

You mentioned the references, did you have any specific details that were integral to Paradise Is Burning? 

Öhrstrand: With the breaking into pool villas, that was something from when I was a kid. I lived in an [apartment] and across the railroad were all these nice houses. When the owners went away for vacation in the summers, we used to swim in their pools. That was one of those things I told Mika about and we then expanded upon that.

Gustafson: We live in Stockholm. Alexander is from Malmö and I’m from Linköping, so we went to [both places] to visit where we grew up. The story is fictional but it’s interesting to embed [our] stories. I told Alex I have a memory of Euro-techno music and lamps in the middle of these woods that had high trees. We found [them], outside where I grew up. So it was real! I brought Alex and he said, “This is too good to not have in the film, just for a little part.” We’re always looking for those details and tones when we write.