GIRLHOOD International Documentary Competition

GIRLHOOD, the new documentary from Academy Aword®-nominated director Liz Garbus, tells two coming-of-age stories from the real America: Shanae, 10 years old when she was gong-roped by five boys, responded by drinking and drugging, graduating to murder at age 12 with the stabbing death of a friend. Megan, abandoned by a mother who turns tricks to support her ravaging heroin addiction, ran away from 10 different foster homes before being arrested for attacking another foster child with a box cutter. Both girls ended up in the Waxler Juvenile Facility, home to Maryland’s most violent juvenile offenders.

With unprecedented access to the system and to the complex interior lives of the protagonists, GIRLHOOD follows Shanae and Megan over the next three years of their lives, as they struggle to come to terms with their crimes, their posts and their futures. One of them will graduate from high school; another will find herself trapped by the demons of her upbringing. But both will struggle to come of age in an America in which childhood, as we would like to imagine it, is in shorter and shorter supply.

A story of mothers and daughters, crime and its consequences, and ceaseless striving in the face of inconceivable adversity, GIRLHOOD is a testament to the faith and struggles of two young girls trying to grow up.