After yet another mission abroad, the young soldier Lotte returns home, completely disillusioned with life. Lotte’s unreliable father offers her a job as a chauffeur for his Nigerian girlfriend, the escort girl Lily. Both Lotte and Lily carry invisible scars and are reluctant at first, but a friendship slowly emerges between the two women, and things take an unexpected turn.
Trine Dyrholm and I discussed a story about a grown-up daughter, an ageing dad; the necessary separation and the longing to reach across to each other. Fupz (manuscript) and I had the desire to explore trafficking. And I started to focus on stories told by soldiers returning from the war. These stories are about being saved or saving somebody. Can you save somebody who doesn’t want salvation? And if you decide to save somebody, aren’t you really saving yourself just as much?
What’s it really like being a soldier? There’s esprit de corps and what you do is meaningful. Soldiers are returning with after-effects. They are haunted by the experiences they’ve been through. They cannot have contact with people who know them, because they feel different. Many return to war where they feel at home. Lotte is a woman, too, who as a little girl played daddy’s boy to gain his attention. The army life among men has forced her to seal off her femininity and emotions.
Lotte’s encounter with Lily, and Lily’s with Lotte, becomes a kind of reversed mirror image. A woman feminized to the extreme. But both are soldiers in their own ways. What they share is that they have both staked their bodies to save somebody. That was an image that enthralled me. We discovered that brothels are to be found all over and there are very few prostitutes who’re here against their own wishes. They work to send money back to their families. They are not victims.
This is the story of three characters all desperate to be saviors or save their own dignity.
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