The Watch List: 5 Films That Capture The Strength, Sisterhood & Realities Of Girlhood
Claire Marie Healy is a writer, editor and the author of Look Again: Girlhood. Her ongoing research project, Girlhood Studies, explores how visual culture shapes the experiences of young women. Here, she curates 5 films that delve into the realities of being a young woman…
“What I love about all these stories is their sense of the shared touchpoints of girlhood, even as they bring to life vastly different cultural contexts onscreen. These points of connection have always felt important to me, and is partly what my Girlhood Studies project has always been about,” she says.
- Drylongso (1998), directed by Cauleen Smith – This beautiful piece of mid-’90s DIY filmmaking is about an artist-in-formation in California, and the injustices that drive her. As young Black men die at an alarming rate around her, art student Pica documents local boys on Polaroid – all the while forging new community with the women around her. It’s a film about creative resilience that also only exists because of Smith’s own creative resilience.
- Smooth Talk (1985), directed by Joyce Chopra – Many of my favourite films about girlhood feel like two movies in one: performing the kind of genre-switch that reflects the contradictory states inherent to young womanhood. Based on a Joyce Carol Oates short story, Smooth Talk stars a young Laura Dern as a giggling, boy-obsessed teenager whose own power games turn very dark.
- Rodeo (2022), directed by Lola Quivoron – Motocross drama Rodeo is stylish but also genuinely thrilling: a lot of it down to the performance of its lead actor, real-life rider Julie Ledru. Watching, it felt like when Andrea Arnold discovered Sasha Lane for American Honey: both teen-girl characters hurtle toward extremes, making you feel both admiring and protective of them at the same time.
- Al-Sit (2020), directed by Suzannah Mirgiani – There is no official film ‘industry’ in Sudan, and the pleasure of seeing how Al-Sit has travelled and moved people all over – at film festivals and also on laptop screens – has been wonderful. In the short film, 15-year-old Nafisa is being forced into an arranged marriage in her cotton-farming village. I love the story’s deliberately executed yet mysterious conclusion – the kind of nuance sorely missing in many dramas centring young women.
- Mustang (2015), directed by Deniz Gamze Ergüven – Mustang felt like a real moment when it was released. It takes the dreamlike aesthetics of a film like The Virgin Suicides – think long-haired sisters lying on top of each other in their pyjamas – while immersing the viewer in a rural Anatolian, highly-religious context, in which the fate allotted to girls is to become obedient wives, passed from one man to another. In the end, it’s the strength of sisterhood that shines through.
