How can we judge people for their choices when we know nothing about their options?
I think I have been absorbed by too many movies I’ve watched. Not ‘too many movies’ in a negative way. It neither affects me nor has a bad influence on me. Instead, it is waking up something inside me. Something that reshapes how I see people.
This time, the movie that hit me deeply was Lilya 4-ever. This movie not only makes me observe, but also absorb. And somehow, in a good way. It made me think about people, choices, and things we think we understand and judge so easily.
Lilya 4-ever is a sad movie, or maybe a tragic story. It’s heavy, uncomfortable, and painfully real to watch. In the movie, Lilya was an abandoned girl by her mom, society, and everyone she could see. The world neglected her and never treated her kindly.
It was like everything had been decided for her since the beginning, and she had no option but to hope her life would be a little bit better. She was alone. She was on her own without the older people who were supposed to protect her. Without safety, she was trying to survive in a cruel world that brought her to that, “making bad choices.”
So when I was watching it, I caught myself judging her for making that decision. I remember having these thoughts. Why did she do that? Why would she make that choice? Why did she trust him? She should’ve ignored that guy and stayed there.
But then I paused. I suddenly rethink what I had just said, even if it was only in my own mind. It was like I was debating with myself. There was one part of me asking something different. What choices did she have? What kind of life leads someone to make such a decision?
Is it really a choice, because it doesn’t look like one? It is a survival shaped by circumstances. It was the life she was forced to live. She didn’t choose to live life like that. She trusted that guy because she needed something to hold on to. A hope, a way out, something better than the life she was trapped in.
And in the first place, she never deserved any of it. She shouldn’t be treated like that. Society shouldn’t neglect her and abandon her, as if she were something unworthy.
And in that moment, the movie made me realize how watching a movie is not so different from watching people in real life. It gave me the painful truth of how easily we misunderstand people and decide who they are.
When we watch a movie, we judge characters based on what the movie presents to us. Through what we see on the screen, we question their decisions, blame them, and judge them as if we wouldn’t do the same if we were given the same script.
And in reality, we do the same thing with people around us that we see through our lens. Sometimes, we are too quick to decide, label, and conclude people as if we’ve lived their lives just by looking at them. When it comes to others, it is so easy for us to judge a life we’ve never lived.
This movie made me realize how easy we misunderstand people when we only see the surface, the small part of their lives. We don’t see the full story, we don’t hear the truth, but we form opinions that we think are enough to decide who they are.
We even look at them for what they did, like something mistake, foolish, and wrong, when it is actually survival from the inside. We judge people for what’s on their plate when we’re never sitting in their chair and seeing the table they were given.
Sometimes people don’t choose their lives. Sometimes, their lives just happen to them.
I think that’s what the Lilya 4–Ever movie did to me. It is not changing something big in me, but softening the way I see people.
From the movie, I realized that the world is deeper than what I see. That people are more than what they appear on the surface. And that behind actions I see through my lens, there might be a story I was never there to witness the truth. It teaches me not to judge someone’s life when I’ve never stood in their shoes.
