Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Filmmakers have often explored the theme of children without adults, and the idea of childhood as its own republic, lawless but precarious. Following a briskly comic London treatment of the topic, Charlotte Regan’s Scrapper, here is Swedish drama Paradise Is Burning, about three sisters whose mother has gone Awol. Aged from seven to 16, they get by, like Scrapper’s young heroine, with canny methods for dodging the attentions of social services; they also have sly, well-rehearsed shoplifting routines.At the start of Mika Gustafson’s feature, the sisters are very much a unit but, over one summer, they drift in different directions. Seven-year-old Steffi (Safira Mossberg, with a formidable glare) bonds with another young outcast. Middle sister Mira (Dilvin Asaad) decides to play manager to a clueless neighbour, a middle-aged man with aspirations to karaoke glory. And the oldest, Laura (Bianca Delbravo), finds an unlikely older partner in crime — Hanna (Ida Engvoll), a middle-class woman who fancies dabbling in transgression, making the teenager her mentor in the art of invading other people’s homes.The sisters’ summer paradises are tainted from the start by the reality of their abandonment and the inadequacy of the adults around them, who are variously negligent, exploitative or simply calamitous. The only people we feel we can trust are the various girls in the story’s predominantly female universe.Gustafson charges her film with both dreamlike languor and riotous energy. Paradise Is Burning exudes joy, but also a sense of imminent collapse — and decidedly no cuteness. At one point in Laura’s developing relationship with Hanna, the ambivalently magnetic Delbravo shoots a look at the camera that is the very essence of teenage check-me-out defiance. If you’re still trying to fathom this summer’s hip shibboleth “Brat”, this film — and that glance — provide as good a definition as any.★★★★☆In UK cinemas from August 30
