Big Girls Don't Cry

Set during the hazy days between Christmas and the new school year in 2006, 14-year-old Sid Bookman lives with her father and older sister in the small coastal New Zealand beach town of Ōmaha. When tourists flood into town for summer, Sid seizes the opportunity to reinvent herself, desperate for recognition as mature and desirable from family, peers, and especially the older girls she idolizes. She throws herself into adolescent rites of passage — drinking, smoking weed, getting a self-piercing — and generally performs coolness in whatever way might win her acceptance from a more popular social circle, in the process drifting away from her childhood friends and clashing with her father. She also discovers the early internet, venturing into chat rooms and instant-messaging apps. Her most charged experiment is impersonating her best friend's brother on an IM app in order to flirt with the girl she has a crush on, a ruse that blurs identity, desire, and deception. Throughout her posturing, Sid is drawn to Freya, her older sister's friend, who radiates the self-assurance Sid craves. Freya, in turn, is the one person who seems to perceive the real Sid beneath all the performance. The film traces Sid's confusion about whether she wants to be Freya, be loved by her, or simply belong to something. Rather than a dramatic coming-out arc, the story unfolds through the small, accumulating humiliations of adolescence — being excluded, caught in lies, wanting too visibly — with an ambiguous ending that leaves Sid's trajectory open.

Sources: NZIFF program page, PinkNews interview, Web search aggregated synopsis (Letterboxd/Sundance/Flicks)