My Life My Lesson

The Story

My Life My Lesson is an intimate portrait of a family living with the scars of domestic violence. Felicia is sixteen, and the camera stays with her across two years of ordinary teenage days and difficult nights.

She tries to keep her father, who no longer lives with the family, on the straight and narrow through phone conversations and text messages. She struggles with self-harming and with sleeping. Her friend Cherifa is a source of support.

The film was directed by Åsa Ekman and had its Swedish premiere at Göteborg Film Festival on January 29, 2015.

My Life My Lesson is a documentary that chooses patience over spectacle. Rather than reducing a family's hardship to a single dramatic moment, the film settles in beside a teenage girl and simply stays, allowing ordinary days and difficult nights to accumulate into something honest. The camera follows her attempts to keep up with school, friendships, and the small rituals of growing up, while the weight of what she has witnessed at home quietly shapes how she moves through the world. It is a portrait built from closeness and trust rather than commentary, letting viewers meet a young person on her own terms.

At the heart of the story is a daughter's relationship with a parent who is no longer living in the household. Through phone calls and messages, she tries to stay connected, to offer guidance, and to hold someone accountable in whatever small ways a teenager can. These exchanges carry a tenderness that is easy to overlook, and the film treats them with care rather than judgment. What emerges is a picture of loyalty that is complicated and persistent, showing how children often take on responsibilities that were never meant to be theirs, and how love and worry can become tangled together.

Domestic violence rarely stays contained within the walls where it happens. The film is attentive to the way its echoes reach into everyday life, shaping how a young person reads a room, anticipates a mood, or decides what to share and what to keep quiet. Rather than lingering on the violence itself, the documentary focuses on its aftermath and the quiet labor of carrying on. This approach keeps the focus where it belongs, on a life being lived rather than a trauma being displayed, and it invites reflection on how families absorb and pass along what they have endured.

The film's visual language reflects its subject with restraint and warmth. Long observational passages give room for silence, and the editing resists easy conclusions, letting the passage of time do its work across two years of footage. The result feels both raw and tender, intimate without being intrusive. Viewers are not handed a lesson or a tidy resolution but are instead invited to sit with complexity, to notice small gestures of resilience, and to recognize the ordinary courage involved in showing up for school, for friends, and for family when the ground beneath has been unsteady.

A documentary like this one finds much of its meaning in the rooms where it is shared. Festival screenings, community gatherings, and classroom conversations give audiences a chance to respond together, to ask questions, and to consider what support looks like for young people growing up around violence. The filmmakers' hope is that the film can serve as a starting point rather than an ending, opening space for discussion among families, educators, and those who work with people affected by abuse. Watching alongside others can turn a private story into a shared invitation to pay closer attention.

For those who care about someone living through this kind of household, the film offers a reminder that listening matters. Young people often need someone who will believe them without demanding a full account, and who will stay present even when the situation is messy or slow to change. The documentary does not present itself as a guide or a solution, but its patient attention suggests a posture worth adopting: ask gently, listen without rushing to fix, and make room for a teenager to be a teenager even while heavier things are happening at home.

What stays with viewers is not the scale of the hardship but the texture of an ordinary life continuing anyway. There are moments of humor, boredom, distraction, and affection, and these are given as much weight as the harder passages. By trusting its subject and its audience, the film makes space for a portrait that is generous and unsentimental at once. It asks us to see a young person clearly, to hold her whole story rather than only its most painful part, and to remember that the people behind such stories are always more than what has happened to them.