“That’s how violence exists in the lives of young women: without consequences, without language”
– BERLINALE 2026: The emerging filmmaker talks about creating a film that directly interrogates the frightening casual nature of sexual violence by drawing directly from accounts of teenage life
(© 2026 Dario Caruso for Cineuropa – dario-caruso.fr, @studio.photo.dar, Dario Caruso)
Over the course of a few days, 17-year-old Sara (Eva Kostić) and her classmate Lina (Martina Danilovska) find themselves contending with unbearably gruelling conditions as their Macedonian class takes a trip by bus to Greece. Kosara Mitić’s 17 [+see also:
film review
interview: Kosara Mitić
film profile], world premiering in Berlinale’s Perspectives strand, presents a piercing exploration of trauma, solidarity and silence embedded in the experience of sexual violence.
Cineuropa: You depict an environment where patriarchal violence is heavily normalised, and the scenes where students misbehave on their school trip – the intense partying and fighting with teachers, for instance – feel shocking. Did you exaggerate certain aspects for dramatic effect, or is it a realistic depiction of this teenage social space?
Kosara Mitić: Adolescence is where we learn silence. Teenagers experience violence for the first time at that stage. Everyone tells them not to make a big deal out of it. Setting this story in adolescence means that the cost of that silence is even bigger. What’s interesting in Macedonia – and everywhere else, I believe – is that violence is very casual. It’s very collective, and it’s unspoken. That was important for me because I wanted to show how violence affects young women especially. That’s how violence exists in the lives of young women: without consequences, without language. It’s very normalised and very casual. Everything in this film came from interviews I conducted with the protagonists, with the kids who were at these auditions. They’re not actors, in that sense – they’re adolescent students. It’s very real for them.
How did the casting and research processes come together?
The research period went on for months. We had kids from the drama and art school, students who were 16, 17 and 18 years old. I was holding interviews about their personal lives. They were telling me stories about violence, sex and their parents – some of them were pregnant but were hiding it. I heard some very interesting stories and was amazed about how these kids live these days. At that point, I realised that what I was writing was the same as what the kids were living through, except their reality was even more dangerous, in a way, because they weren’t conscious of it. It’s all seen as very natural, and we live in a very patriarchal society. They don’t even talk about it with their parents – they know nothing.
Lina says something like, “Don’t tell my mother.” She’s compelled to silence.
Even in their own homes, they’re living secret lives. The film portrays the consequences of systematic neglect of young people, especially young women. Traumatic experiences are invisible because the system is either repressive or indifferent. 17 shows how trauma festers when it’s denied and how female bodies are violated physically and emotionally – how the silence around them becomes equally violent.
There’s a duality to the female friendship in the film between Lina and Sara, where trust must also overcome the scepticism that’s developed.
This female solidarity isn’t romanticised, and it’s not perfect. It’s very rough and fragile, but it’s real. Lina enters Sara’s world as the first person to see Sara as she really is, and she doesn’t turn away. She decides to stay through to the very end. That’s how they form a bond, and it’s founded on their individual trauma from this [class] trip, one in the form of an unwanted pregnancy and the other sexual violence. In societies where institutions are failing, interpersonal connections become a lifeline.
When it came to staging the different scenes, what were your focuses in terms of the performances and the acting?
From the outset, I decided not to objectivise Sara’s experience, so the camera stays close to her, at eye level, and sometimes behind her. This subjectivising creates an intimacy but also a limitation, because we only see what she sees and know what she knows. I wanted the audience to align with the main character and her inner state. In terms of the scenes and our approach with the kids, we dove into their private lives: everything from emotions to experiences. Even in the fight scene, the sex scenes and the scenes where two girls quarrel, I gave them total freedom. It was important to take pure emotion from them – not to direct them, but to take from them. We had lots of rehearsals but, when it came to the shoot, they were on their own. We only filmed for 20 days. They knew what they were doing because they were living the characters for months before the shoot started, so it was a very easy process.
What led you to the film’s very long final sequence in the bathroom with Sara? We don’t see that much, but it’s still very visceral.
I wanted an ending that didn’t offer easy closure, because real life rarely does. The ending is about Sara’s transformation. She makes a choice and undergoes total transformation, far away from everything. I think it respects the complexity of the experience, in a way, and leaves space for the audience to reflect. The transformation is that she takes moral responsibility for what has happened. Nobody in the film does that. Nobody takes responsibility – not the teachers, not the kids, not their parents. In that moment, she says, “That’s enough – I can do this no matter what.” Maybe something will happen to her, or maybe not. But she makes the bold decision to get off the bus and that’s the most important thing.
