By MATTHEW SWEET

Lukas Moodysson - the most celebrated Swedish film director after Ingmar Bergman - tends to fasten on subjects you would assume were beyond his personal experience.

He examined the trials of being a teenage lesbian in [Expletive] Amal (also known, for propriety's sake, as Show Me Love); the ups and downs of 70s communal living in Together; and the horrors of human trafficking in his new one, Lilya 4-Ever.

But he tends to get the details right - as the grown-up lesbians, former commune members and East European sex workers who have seen his films will attest.

Lilya 4-Ever has already been chosen as Sweden's entry for next year's Academy Awards, but I doubt whether this will give Moodysson much joy. He used the platform at a recent awards ceremony to reflect upon the pointlessness of awards ceremonies (the audience booed him from the stage).

Lilya 4-Ever is a punishing road-to-ruin picture about a Russian teenager (Oksana Akinshina) whose desperate desire to escape her life on an end-of-the-world housing estate in the former Soviet Union allows her to be tricked into a life of sexual slavery in Stockholm.

She believes she is getting on the plane to restart her life with her nice new Swedish boyfriend, who claims to have found her a place to live and a job picking vegetables.

Instead, she finds herself imprisoned in an empty apartment, forced to have sex with a series of anonymous men while a pimp lurks outside the door.

Those expecting a replay of the melancholic comedy of Moodysson's first two films are in for a chilly surprise. The principal moment of comic relief in Lilya 4-Ever comes from a scene in which the heroine and her friends spend a night in her fungus-covered bedsit sniffing glue and popping a random assortment of prescription drugs.

The message of the film is clear: instead of rescuing the former Soviet Union from oppression, capitalism has done to it what Lilya's clients are doing to her.

"She's treated like a McDonald's hamburger," Moodysson argues. "She's something that you can buy or sell, and throw away when you've finished with it."

Moodysson was born in 1969 in Malmo. He still lives there with his wife, Coco, and their two sons, in a flat in the town centre.

He grew up, like many of his generation, regarding the Soviet Union with sentimental awe.

He idolised the ice-hockey teams who came to play in Sweden and left the country loaded with gold medals. ("They seemed like wonderful, infallible machines," he coos.)

Now he wonders whether Russia's enthusiastic adoption of capitalism has been of any benefit to ordinary Russians, and describes a conversation he had with an Azeri taxi-driver.

"He said his whole country was like a whore. You go to a clothes store and they ask you if you want to have sex. You go into a restaurant and they ask you if you want to buy a girl.

"But it would be wrong to blame the pimps for it. We're the ones with the money. We're the ones who exploit them. We are the ones who build factories in the Baltic states and pay their workers wages that are too low for them to survive on."

I've heard plenty of film personnel moralise in such a way, often while they're lolling in a suite at the Dorchester.

But Moodysson looks physically uncomfortable as he talks, shifting his position on the sofa, dipping his fingers into his turn-ups, adjusting and re-adjusting his woolly hat.

He's identified an injustice - human trafficking from Eastern to Western Europe - and made a film about it that is as terrifying as it ought to be.

He's arranged for copies of the movie to be sent to women's groups in Tajikistan and Kazakhstan, and appeared on public panels discussing the issues raised by his film.

But that doesn't mean he knows what should be done about it.

In Together, Moodysson satirised those who think they have come up with the answers.

I'm not surprised that promoting Lilya 4-Ever while being ferried from gala to gala has left its director feeling particularly torn.

"Of course," he says, "it's very nice to come to a fancy hotel and have someone present you with champagne and chocolates for no reason.

"Maybe it's something you should do once in a while ... "

He trails off, unconvinced by his own argument.

"But when I think about it, I hate it. I really, really hate it."

On Screen

* Who: Lukas Moodysson

* What: Lilya 4-Ever

* Where and when: Academy, showing now

* Read Peter Calder's review of Lilya 4-Ever

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