Big Girls Don't Cry

Over one transformative summer in rural New Zealand in 2006, 14-year-old Sid Bookman discovers desire, identity, and the internet as she imitates the people she longs to be loved by.

Paloma Schneideman, mentored through Jane Campion’s film program, crafts an artful coming-of-age portrait of queer adolescence that beautifully inhabits the liminal space between youth and adulthood, desire and experience — a time when we’re conscious of everything, but lacking language for any of it. With aching recognition, we’re inescapably drawn into Sid (newcomer Ani Palmer in a stellar breakout performance) — her trying on of identities, mimicry, feigning of maturity, shame, and longing for acceptance — as she endears herself to a group of older teens, the first generation for whom sexual curiosity is entwined with the internet. Schneideman’s voice is fresh and vibrant, her intimate, shallow-focus photography drawn to faces and bodies, full of precarity and vulnerability and perfectly attuned to these young people. The film breathes with specificity and authenticity, ironically rendering so sharply an interior life that is, by its nature, so obscure. — JN

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