Girls State (2024)

🎭 Story Kernel

Girls State serves as a poignant, often frustrating companion piece to Moss and McBaine’s Boys State, shifting the lens to a Missouri program where 500 teenage girls navigate a simulated government. While the boys’ version felt like a high-stakes Machiavellian playground, this film exposes the structural inequities embedded in the program itself. It is less about the pursuit of raw power and more about the realization of its systemic limitations. The documentary captures a pivotal moment in American history, filmed as the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision loomed, forcing these young women to confront the fragility of their own bodily autonomy while practicing the very politics that govern it. It is a study of ambition filtered through a double standard, highlighting how these girls are taught to lead while being simultaneously policed on their attire, behavior, and institutional funding.

🎬 Visual Aesthetics

The cinematography employs an observational, fly-on-the-wall style that oscillates between the grand scale of the university campus and the suffocating intimacy of dorm room debates. Moss and McBaine use tight close-ups to capture the internal calculations of the protagonists—specifically Emily Worthmore’s growing disillusionment and Cecilia Bartin’s sharp rhetorical pivots. The visual language emphasizes the contrast between traditional, almost performative patriotic pageantry and the raw, modern anxieties of the participants. Symbolism is found in the physical boundaries of the Missouri campus, which act as a microcosm for the broader American political landscape. The editing creates a rhythmic tension, juxtaposing the girls' earnest legislative efforts with the realization that their state is fundamentally different—and more restricted—than the one their male counterparts inhabit, highlighting a visual and social divide that persists throughout the film.

🔍 Details & Easter Eggs

💡 Behind the Scenes

Girls State is the spiritual successor to the 2020 documentary Boys State, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. Directors Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine chose Missouri specifically because it is one of the few states where the Boys and Girls State programs are held simultaneously on the same campus, allowing for a direct comparison of the two experiences. The film was produced by Davis Guggenheim’s Concordia Studio and Apple Original Films. The filmmakers had to navigate strict rules regarding filming on a college campus while capturing the spontaneous, unscripted interactions of hundreds of teenagers during a high-pressure week.