BlackBird

Roni lives a hellish, lonely, drunken existence in the bleak borderland of the Austrian countryside. She’s 16, she’s slept with pretty much every boy in town, she drinks herself to sleep daily, and has a narcissistic mother who will never stop trying her best to hurt her. This is how Joe, the local bad boy and part time pimp finds her. He takes her in, guides her through her last two years of school with a steady hand, getting her nice and ready to take on the job they both know she is being raised to do. On her 18th birthday, like a lamb to slaughter, she is taken into a brothel to become a prostitute. But the small problem of her schooling is still there, so for her first year, she must balance her life as an innocent teenager, sitting through boring math classes, and her other, darker, hidden existence as a whore. Even after she is done with school, the duality of her life doesn’t go away: on the one hand she’s nothing but an income source for Joe. But on the other hand, he is beginning to really fall in love with this stoic, broken, yet somehow still spirited young woman. But when Roni is done, when she feels she’s experienced her rock bottom… it must all end. He can only watch in horror as the woman he loves emancipates herself, and understands that she can, truly, stand on her own two feet. Her way out of prostitution is as linear as her way in had been: her decision. Her path. Her own two feet. Taking her there, and back again.