Smalltown Girl

"It was a long time before I was able to acknowledge the massive secret I am carrying," Hille Norden says right at the start of our conversation in a Berlin café one late-summer morning. "But the time came when I realised that I could never move forward if I failed to deal with it properly. No matter what I tried to concentrate on, there was always something standing in my way." The director, born in Kiel in 1998, speaks quite openly about that secret these days – the sexual violence she suffered as a child and a teenager; it was only years later that she faced up to her experience in therapy. Parallel to that, she began to examine her experiences in the screenplay for "Smalltown Girl" ("Easy Girl", 2025). "It is totally unacceptable. When you have been raped, for the man it is over after perhaps an hour; then, he just goes on living his life. But you have to trek to therapy for a whole year, like some kind of idiot," she says, summing up her fury. "That’s why I made the decision to write about my story as well. To make sure this time doesn’t seem like another, added punishment."

The resulting film is about a young woman called Nore; it is her feature film debut, and was also invited to compete in the debut film competition at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival after its premiere at Hamburg Film Festival. Nore lurches energetically but aimlessly through a life filled with sex and male acquaintances, only slowly becoming aware of what was done to her as a teenager. You can come to terms with a tragic past in different ways! And that is perhaps not so surprising. Because "Smalltown Girl", as you soon realise when you meet Norden in person, is very much like its creator: refreshingly blunt, extremely self-confident, and blessed with a great deal of dark humour.

What the director – who had already made the documentaries "Khello Brüder" ("Khello Brothers") and "Heimat sucht Seele" ("Soul Settlement", 2021) – definitely did not want to do in her autobiographically inspired work was make a film that sensationalises the material or torments its audiences. Instead, it has been directed so that initially, the subject matter is not revealed: telling a story of trauma yet affirming life, both colourful and bitter, and above all with a lucid awareness of contradictions. "It was clear from the outset that I could only cover a very small part of this broad subject," she points out. "I was only interested in the moment of realising what I had actually experienced. And in portraying the emotional ambivalence that goes with that."

In an industry that tends to favour clarity and shock impact, Norden's approach was met with scepticism, if not outright rejection. Getting "Smalltown Girl" off the ground was a huge undertaking, both financially and psychologically. There was a therapist on set to support both the director and the entire crew, all of whom – not a matter of course – needed to read the script to understand what the film was really about. Given the numerous sex scenes, intimacy coordination was also provided. But the key factor behind the success of this project, which Norden herself considers only 'moderately radical' but definitely courageous, was finding the right leading actress.

"I needed an actress who had both humour and great intelligence. Someone who could portray emotions and withstand antagonism, but above all, someone who was prepared to endure a physi­cal performance taking her beyond her limits," explains Norden, referring to the cast­ing process that ultimately led her to new­comer, Dana Herfurth. "This character is a young who oscillates between femme fatale and a childlike quality; at the same time, she could organise an orgy with five men without batting an eyelid. On the one hand, she is tougher than all of us; on the other, she is totally helpless. Dana was the only one at the audition who I believed could be all those things at once."

Liberating though the work on "Smalltown Girl" may have been for Norden, she did not make the film purely for herself. "Filmmaking is too expensive to do it just for self-fulfilment," she says, dismissing that idea and instead expressing the hope that it will play its part in facilitating more fear-free conversations about sexual violence in future. "In my view, films are a service to society. Cinema is an incredibly invasive art form. When you go to the cinema, you have to open up and you are completely unprotected, so as a director, you have to give audiences an argument that is relevant to them, and explain why your pain is also their pain."

Author: Patrick Heidmann