Sundance's Spotlight on Growing Up
Coming-of-age films reigned supreme at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. The lineup of films screened this year featured a multitude of movies focusing on teenage and child characters. Many of this year's contenders meditate on young characters learning how to navigate complex interpersonal relationships—and their relationships with themselves—for the first time.
Sundance Film Festival 2024
Some of the most acclaimed youth-centered movies at Sundance were international dramas. Girls Will Be Girls, written, directed, and produced by Indian filmmaker Suchi Talati, tells the story of an Indian teenage girl named Mira as she struggles to reconcile her sexual awakening and a rebellious streak with her mother's distress over her own squandered youth. It seems to work well as a companion to In the Summers by Colombian-American writer-director Alessandra Lacorazza Samudio. Samudio's film also focuses on a parent-child relationship, this time the tumultuous connection between two teenage girls and their troubled father as he navigates his struggle with addiction while raising his daughters. This film took home the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Dramatic Competition, the highest award distributed by the festival. While Girls Will Be Girls and In the Summers do not currently have streaming or theatrical release dates, they both received multiple awards and excessive recognition at Sundance—stay on the lookout for further updates regarding their release dates, which are almost assuredly to be expected soon.
Many coming-of-age dramas focus on teenagers, but only a select few focus specifically on the awkward transition from childhood to teenagehood. The film that took home the ultimate prize at the festival this year did just that. Dìdi is the debut film of Chinese-American writer-director Sean Wang that tells the story of a thirteen-year-old Taiwanese-American boy scrambling to hold his messy life together as he enters high school and deals with heartbreak, hurt, and the start of growing up. Wang’s earnest ruminations on this era of youth earned him the U.S. Dramatic Audience Award, one of—if not the—top prize at Sundance. Focus Features has acquired the rights to Dìdi, and the film will see a wider release on July 26th of this year.
Courtesy of How to Have Sex
In a more gritty take on growing up, British filmmaker Molly Manning Walker writes and directs How to Have Sex, a drama centered around three teenage girls and their dreamy summer vacation to Crete wherein they embark on a journey to achieve three goals: get drunk, party, and, above all, lose their virginity. The film deals with issues of consent and the imbalance of power between women and men in a sexual context and tells an emotionally stirring and necessary story. Many of the audience members who attended the film's Sundance screening were reportedly in tears by the time the credits began rolling. How to Have Sex is currently seeing a limited release in select arthouse cinemas internationally and will arrive on the streaming service Mubi on April 5th.
For fans of the coming-of-age genre, 2024 promises to be a year of unique, compelling, and exciting watches.
