‘Easy Girl’: Hille Norden’s Buzzy Debut, on Trauma and Friendship, Competes at Tallinn Black Nights

German writer-director Hille Norden makes her debut with “Easy Girl,” a candy-colored, flamboyant and deeply personal film about trauma, friendship and survival. Its international sales repped by Reason8 at the American Film Market, the film will have its international premiere in the First Feature section at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF).

Written and directed by Norden, whose screenplay was shortlisted for the German Script Award in 2022, “Easy Girl” follows the story of Nore, a free-spirited femme fatale in her mid-twenties who was the victim of sexual assault as a girl. When she reunites with childhood schoolmate Jonna a decade later, their friendship becomes a journey through desire, pain and healing.

Newcomer Dana Herfurth (“The Disappearance of Josef Mengele”) stars as Nore, with Luna Jordan (“Euphorie”) playing the reserved medical student Jonna.

What begins as a haze of alcohol, cigarette-fuelled hedonistic parties gradually shifts into a painful excavation of memory, as Jonna starts to see through Nore’s confident surface and uncovers the wounds that fuel her reckless pursuit of sex.

Norden’s palette is playful and bright, the lavish, sexy dresses which Nore sews for their nights out reflecting both her vitality and her vulnerability.

Her goal, she tells Variety, is to show that beauty, pain and humor can coexist in stories about survival and self-definition.

“I wanted to make a film that, wherever there is space for it, is fun and entertaining, so that, even though the topic is sinister, it is wrapped in something nice.

“I don’t believe you can turn shit into gold,” she adds. “If you look at gruesomeness and paint it with glitter, the gruesomeness doesn’t disappear. But you added something beautiful. And that makes it a little bit easier to deal with it. This is what I did in my life. And this is what I did in my movie.”

That balance between beauty and brutality runs through the film. “Beauty is next to the abyss,” Norden reflects. “And violence is very close to happiness. This is also why Nore continues mixing things up: she constantly confuses love with violence. Both of those things are very close: it’s a survival mechanism.”

“Easy Girl” revisits the “Lolita” archetype from a distinctly female perspective, reframing the notions of desire, consent and agency, leaving no doubt that for her sex with a female child, whatever the circumstances, is abuse.

Mirroring the messy, non-linear process of healing, the film moves back and forth between past and present, between reality and Nore’s memories, highlighting the grey zones of trauma and recovery.

“I wanted to show that you can talk about it and nothing happens: You can have a boyfriend, you can work, you can be a filmmaker. You can be anything. And there’s no shame in having survived sexual violence,” she says. “I know how it feels to be so very ashamed of it. But it actually makes no sense. And I believe that the shame that I used to feel was the shame of the perpetrator.”

That theme of self-acceptance lies at the film’s emotional core, an inner reckoning that marks the turning point when Nore starts to love herself and allows others to love her. “We believe that it’s very hard for others to love us with the traces of abuse on us.

“The last thing you want to do is say, ‘Yeah, I’m good the way I am because I’m shaped by somebody breaking my will,’” she says. “But eventually you realize you’re not so much shaped by that incident, but by your choices. And it’s just very hard to unlearn that violence is not love. But it is possible. Those wounds can surely be healed.”

Looking ahead, Norden is developing two fiction projects: one exploring how love and intimacy have evolved over the past two decades amid shifting gender dynamics, and another born of her collaboration with the German military, aimed at bridging the divide between civilian and military perspectives in Germany.

“Easy Girl,” which bowed at Filmfest Hamburg in September under the title “Smalltown Girl,” is produced by Leitwolf Filmproduktion and Kinescope Film, with ZDF/Das Kleine Fernsehspiel as co-producer.

The film has its international premiere at Tallinn Black Nights on Nov. 18.