‘Girls State’ Ticket Amanda McBaine And Jesse Moss Take New Approach To Teens In Politics — Sundance Studio

TITLE: Girls State
Section: Premieres
Directors: Amanda McBaine, Jesse Moss
Logline: Teenage girls from wildly different backgrounds across Missouri navigate a week-long immersive experiment in American democracy, build a government from the ground up, and reimagine what it means to govern. Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss’ return to the captivating world of teenage-led politics follows ambitions unfolding as hundreds of teenage girls gather to build a representative government in Missouri during a session of Girls State, co-hosted alongside Boys State. As the girls run for office, they also methodically preside over a reproductive rights case while the real-life overturning of Roe v. Wade hangs in the balance.

Distributor: Apple
Panelists: Amanda McBaine, Jesse Moss
First screening: Thursday, Jan. 18
Key quotes: “We did not want to make Boys State starring girls. I felt satisfied with what we explored in that film with boyhood, but also with exploring electoral politics, what we do to win an election. And this was about something else. This was about representational democracy and what kind of headwinds women feel, both sort of what they’ve internalized and what happens institutionally. So that was an exploration I knew I wanted to do, but more importantly, I really needed to find those kids. We needed to find those kids who we wanted to go on the journey with and we spent a lot of time finding them before the event started.” (Amanda McBaine)

“When we were researching Boys State, we actually reached out to the Texas Girls State program and we weren’t sure where we would end up, but we were interested in young people coming of age in this political moment. We ended up with the boys in Texas, but even before the film was out in the world, we thought we have to make a sibling. It’s not a sequel, it’s a sibling, and they’re related. They share DNA, but we wanted this project to sort of be what it is and to be different and to allow ourselves to go in the directions that it led us and not impose some sort of sequel constraints on it. (Jesse Moss)

The Deadline Studio at Sundance ran from January 19-22 at 608 Main Street, when the cast and creatives behind the best and buzziest titles in this year’s lineup joined Deadline’s festival team to discuss their movies and the paths they took to get to Park City. 

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