Amateur Teens (2015)

Amateur Teens: Directed by Niklaus Hilber. With Fabrizio Borsani, Jérôme Humm, Benjamin Dangel, Annina Walt. A modern tragedy about a group of 14-year-old schoolchildren whose daily life is shaped by the power of social media and ever increasing sexualisation through the Internet.

“The story follows a group of Swiss boys and girls in their mid- teens. They all go to the same high school in Zurich and seem like your everyday sorts of teenagers. However, their outlook is largely shaped by external influences and vices, eg porn, drugs, social media, peer pressure. This leads to some dramatic actions and consequences.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eNot a new subject – pretty much a 2015 update of Larry Clarku0026#39;s Kids, in a Swiss setting. Is quite sensitively done though. While Kids was good, it teetered on the brink between a profound story and creepiness. Niklaus Hilber, the director of Amateur Teens does his best to be confronting without turning the movie into some cheap titillation exercise, and does so very well.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThe stories are honest, realistic and engaging yet the tone is not overly judgmental. The kids have redeeming qualities, to an extent, and there are enough examples to show that not everybody is like this. There is some hope for the youth of today.”