ON the cover of a leaflet for Lukas Moodysson's Lilya 4-Ever are a quartet of pictures: blond hair, brown eyes, glossy lips, pouting mouth.

Full of teenage promise. Yet inside await details of Unicef UK's End Child Exploitation and Amnesty's Justice For All In Russia campaigns.

After Show Me Love and Together, ever-bold Swedish director Moodysson has delved into the sex trade for a dark, deeply humane study of adult abuse and neglect of children in a mire of poverty, corruption and exploitation.

Lilya (Oksana Akinshina) is abandoned by her mother with the false promise of a new life in America. Instead, at 16, she is dumped on the welfare system, kicked out of her parents' flat in a dismal suburb by her bullying aunt, and left to a life of no money, no letters, no contact.

Forced to move to a stinking, run-down flat, she has only one friend, the equally desperate if good-hearted Volodya (Artiom Bogucharsky), a boy driven to the edge of suicide by his father's brutality. Together, they seek release in fantasy, their passage aided by glue sniffing.

Lilya is drawn into offering her personal services in clubs, until hope arrives in the handsome form of Andrei, who offers her a new start in Sweden. Yet how could this be anything but a one-way ticket to even worse times?

Lilya 4-Ever is draining, bleaker than Thomas Hardy at his most fatalistic, all the more so for the story being focused on children and played with such heartbreaking truth. Moodysson seeks to bring the hope of transcendental escape to his harrowing drama but the reality is the need for Unicef and Amnesty.

Updated: 09:24 Friday, May 30, 2003