About the director

Saulė Bliuvaitė, born in 1994, is a director and screenwriter from Lithuania. Between 2016 and 2021, she made four short films, the last of which (Limousine, 2021) won awards at GoEast IN Wiesbaden and the Warsaw Film Festival. Her debut feature film Toxic premiered at the 77th Locarno Film Festival, where it won the competition for the Golden Leopard and also received the Swatch First Feature Award and the Ecumenical Jury Prize.

Press reviews

„The mean girls of your average Hollywood teen movie wouldn’t last a morning in the ruthless adolescent playground of Toxic, where economic exploitation and unforgiving body image standards rule the bullies and their prey alike. [...] Saulė Bliuvaitė‘s impressively tough-minded debut feature is uncompromising in its depiction of the punishment and self-abuse endured by girls enrolled at a fly-by-night modeling academy — where the vague promise of an escape to pretty much anywhere is enough to motivate frightening extremes of disordered eating and body modification.“ (Guy Lodge, Variety)

„Beyond food, parents, school and relationships, toxicity can also stem from the overall surrounding emptiness and lack of meaningful life prospects [...]. An environment that fails to motivate young people to develop an enriching inner world automatically poisons the outer one. With a searching camera and particular attention paid to reflecting the emotional frequencies of the characters – not just through their interactions, but also through their silent, individual turmoil – the director intuitively captures vibrations that cannot be verbalised and that only imagery can convey. This makes the film [mesmerizingly] cinematic, in the most intimate sense of the term.“ (Mariana Hristova, Cineuropa)

The director about the film

“As I myself grew up in a bleak industrial area, I was living with the thought of escaping – not just from my surroundings, but also from my body. I was very thin, trying to enrol in modelling agencies around my town, but I was constantly told some parts of my body were too big to fit the standard. I kept pursuing it, seeking validation in places where I couldn’t find any. This film is based on my own experiences as a 13-year-old girl and on the events that unfolded around me at that time.

The core subject of this film is the human body. It explores the ways we relate to our bodies and deal with our imperfections.” (Statement by Saulė Bliuvaitė for the European Film Academy)