Lilya 4-ever (Swedish: Lilja 4-ever) is a 2002 crime drama film written and directed by Lukas Moodysson, which was released in Sweden on 23 August 2002.

[3] It depicts the downward spiral of Lilja Michailova, played by Oksana Akinshina, a girl in the former Soviet Union whose mother abandons her to move to the United States.

The story is loosely based on the true case of Danguolė Rasalaitė,[4] and examines the issue of human trafficking and sexual slavery.

When the figure turns around, the film introduces the audience to Lilya Michailova, an adolescent girl who has recently been badly beaten.

Meanwhile, Lilya forms another close, protective friendship with a younger boy named Volodya, who is physically abused by his alcoholic single father.

Lilya panics when she sees a policewoman pull up outside a gas station (Witek had lied to her that if she tried to escape, the police would deport her back to her country and his partners would find and kill her there) and runs through the streets of Malmö before stopping on a bridge and crying tears of exhaustion and defeat.

With the story arriving full circle to the scene at the beginning of the film, Lilya ignores Volodya's angel as he begs her to stop and jump from the bridge overpass to her death.

The script was loosely based on the life of Danguolė Rasalaitė, a 16-year-old girl from Lithuania whose case had made headlines in Sweden in 2000.

When she arrived, a man referred to as "the Russian," who would become her pimp, took her passport and told her she would have to repay him 20,000 SEK (US$2410 in 1999; $4410 today) for travel expenses and she was forced to prostitute herself for the next month.

[9][10] The screenplay was originally supposed to be deeply religious, with Jesus being a prominent character, walking next to Lilja throughout the story.

[12] While Artyom Bogucharsky had no previous acting experience, Oksana Akinshina had already starred in Sergei Bodrov, Jr.'s 2001 crime film Sisters.

Dahlström, whose mother is of Russian descent, also served as assistant director, which the producers held as an advantage since she was the same age as the title character.

A custom built rickshaw, made from the wheels of a mountain bike, was used for the long rearward-facing tracking shots.

[21] The film has also been utilised by humanitarian organisations, in information campaigns against human trafficking in various Eastern European countries.

In Moldova, the International Organization for Migration received the distribution rights and organised screenings attended by 60,000 people, mostly young females but also members of the government.

Malena Janson started her review in Svenska Dagbladet by hailing Moodysson's ability to address different themes and emotional spectra, thereby escaping comparison between his pictures.

[28] Manohla Dargis of the Los Angeles Times noted that the image of the girl lured into prostitution might be a cliché, but held the director's honest intention as an acceptable excuse: "Moodysson wants us to see that there's a real person under the platitudes".

Rayns dismissed the film as melodramatic and lacking in substance, while also criticizing the stylistic choice of the dream sequences, as well as the soundtrack's composition: "The most extreme case is [the] use of Rammstein's "Mein Herz brennt", played at woofer-challenging volume over the opening and closing scenes.

Even if we take the volume as a metaphor for the girl's wish to block out the world, it's absurd to imagine that Lilja would ever relate to or even listen to a Rammstein track in German.