True/False 2024: Girls State is an empowering, heartbreaking return to 2022’s most divisive week

Girls State. // Courtesy of Apple TV Original Films

The True/False Film Festival is currently running in Columbia, MO. The nationally renowned event brings together many of the year’s most important upcoming documentaries and our film editor Abby Olcese is sharing highlights throughout the weekend. Read this year’s other coverage here as it goes live. 

If you have any lingering PTSD around the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Roe v. Wade, consider this a trigger warning. Girls State will make you feel everything you felt in the summer of 2022, then lift your hopes up, then dash them once again with a closing card reminding you that six weeks after the events of the film we lost national protections for abortion (the postscript reads like a nightmare parody of the “Poochy died on his way back to his home planet” joke from The Simpsons.)

Before we get there, however, Girls State is an uplifting and inspiring survey of a group of go-getting young women finding their voices and learning to stand up for themselves. It’s an interesting companion to directors Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss’ previous entry in their duology, Boys State, both in the politics it explores and the gender dynamics that define the journeys of the characters the directors follow. 

Boys State was set in Texas, but Girls State moves the action to Missouri, where for one week, a group of high school girls convene on the Lindenwood University campus in St. Charles to form parties and build a mock government.

Among the girls advocating for change and running for leadership positions are Nisha, the bright, socially awkward daughter of South Asian immigrant parents; Emily, a high-achieving, proudly conservative preacher’s kid; Brooke, a beauty queen who runs for Girls State’s Supreme Court; Faith, whose progressive beliefs differ from her deeply conservative family’s; and Tochi, a clever Raytown resident and the daughter of Nigerian immigrants. 

2022 marks the first year that both Girls State and Boys State programs are held concurrently at the same location. For the first time, the girls have more than just anecdotal evidence from their peers that the two programs provide vastly different experiences. McBaine and Moss highlight the programs’ differences by occasionally cutting to the boys’ program to show what they’re doing while the girls develop rah-rah chants and make cupcakes at their opening reception. 

The girls protest their program’s antiquated dress code and buddy system requirement, while discussing the then-recently leaked information that SCOTUS is preparing to knock down Roe. Meanwhile, the Boys get right into debating policy, much of it centered around female bodily autonomy. The last act of the film detours into Spotlight territory as Emily writes an article highlighting the programs’ lack of parity (a particularly damning statistic: Missouri’s Boys State has three times the budget of Girls State.)

While Boys State was an exploration of the political process, highlighting teenage boys who were clearly on a track to somewhere big, Girls State, for obvious reasons, is more concerned with its young subjects’ awareness of the world’s active hostility toward them. It’s also a more relational film; you can see connections being formed that will likely last the rest of the girls’ lives, which is an uplifting detour from the air of frustration surrounding them.

Ninety percent of Girls State is a down-the-middle crowd pleaser in the line of its predecessor. However, it ends much less conclusively.

It’s heartwarming to know that these girls have allies in each other to support them and have their back through whatever comes their way. However, as its ending card makes abundantly clear, whatever they pursue, they will struggle in ways their male counterparts will never have to consider. It’s great to see the formation of future Leslie Knopes.

It’s heartbreaking to know their uphill climb is only just beginning.