Girl Worlds and Girl Gangs.
Strong and resolute young women are inspiring WinWin media columnist Athena Bellas to find and create community.
Share this story:
Watch this:
Girlhood
Celine Sciamma’s 2014 film Girlhood follows the story of Marieme (Karidja Touré), a black sixteen-year-old living in government housing outside of Paris. One day after a disastrous and emotionally devastating day at school, Marieme joins a girl gang, and this experience transforms her life.
One of the things I really love about Girlhood is how it portrays girls as complex and complicated, allowing them to take risks and make mistakes, and doesn’t judge them for it. Instead, the film represents girls as three-dimensional beings rather than shallow stereotypes. The girls in the gang are at once innocent and worldly, caring and brittle, fiercely independent and deeply vulnerable.
This is particularly important for movies about girls of colour, who are often represented through a range of racist stereotypes, or do not get represented at all.
Girlhood is a film that treats its subject matter and its audience with respect, inviting us to expand our ideas about what the girlhood rite of passage looks like.
🎥
Girlhood is streaming on Stan and Kanopy.
Watch this:
Derry Girls
Set in Northern Ireland in the 1990s during ‘the Troubles’, Derry Girls is an incredibly funny and irreverent exploration of the lives of five teenage girls – Erin (Saoirse-Monica Jackson), Clare (Nicola Coughlan), Michelle (Jamie-Lee O’Donnell) and Orla (Louisa Harland) – and their friend, the ‘wee English fella’ James (Dylan Llewellyn).
The show perfectly captures the awkward moments of high school life, and while they are comedic and sometimes even slapstick scenes of teen awkwardness, it never feels like we’re necessarily laughing at the girls themselves.
The humour arises out of identification with their feelings, anxieties, and circumstances, whether we are going through it right now or looking back on that part of our lives.
By the end of season one, we come to really love these girls and the wee English fella, making the heartfelt finale episode where they all rally together to support one another particularly joyful. I can’t wait for season two!
📺
Season one of Derry Girls is streaming on Netflix.
Listen to this:
Mountain Man—Magic Ship
Molly Sarlé, Amelia Meath and Alexandra Sauser-Monnig met in college in 2010 and made their first critically acclaimed album, Made the Harbor. Eight years later, after a tour with Feist and separately pursuing other projects, they released Magic Ship.
Their three voices – acapella in some songs and accompanied by a single guitar in others – draw us into their vividly rendered dream worlds (‘Boat’) and everyday observations (‘AGT’ and ‘Rang Tang Ring Toon’).
There is a special magic to Mountain Man’s almost otherworldly harmonies; their sound soothes, but never lulls the listener.
There is a special magic to Mountain Man’s almost otherworldly harmonies; their sound soothes, but never lulls the listener.
And the album’s twists and turns from the sounds of traditional folk (‘Baby Where You Are’), to the playful (‘Underwear’), to songs of profound emotional weight (‘Guilt’), keep us engaged in their quiet yet urgent narratives.
Photos of Mountain Man by Shervin Lainez
🎧
Magic Ship is streaming on Apple Music and Spotify.
All release info is current at time of publishing, July 2019