Ten minutes into Girls State, a documentary about what it would look like if teen girls from Missouri ran things for a week, a 17-year-old named Maddie starts to question the mock government camp’s star-spangled feminism.
“Something about this feels sexist,” she says during a song-and-dance exercise, dropping her arms. “If the boys don’t have to do this, I’m gonna be so pissed,” the camper beside her agrees.
Girls State, a program sponsored by the American Legion, is held annually in every state alongside a companion program, Boys State. Curiosity about the siloed boys’ program, just across campus, runs high with these girls.
It’s easy to go into Girls State with qualms that the film will lean on tired girlboss tropes or revel in portraying a feminist utopia while neglecting intersectionality. But directors Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine are smart and self-aware in chronicling the summer program for high school juniors, striking a tone somewhere between a riveting election night broadcast and Bo Burnham’s coming-of-age tearjerker Eighth Grade.
Girls State is a follow-up to the 2020 documentary Boys State, also directed by Moss and McBaine, which centered on the Boys State program in Texas. Ahead of Girls State’s premiere at Full Frame and on Apple TV+ on April 5, the INDY spoke with Moss and McBaine about how the documentary came to be.
INDY: What about the Girls State and Boys State programs spoke to you, as documentary filmmakers?
Jesse Moss: In 2017, the country was being torn apart. Trump was president. Our divisions were, and still are, so pronounced. We were looking to make sense of our country and future and democracy. We’d read about the Texas [Boys State] program and we liked the idea that these programs could be a window into young people coming of age in this moment. This idea of civil discourse: Have we lost it, or can we still talk to each other despite our political differences? Here was a laboratory to explore that question with 17-year-olds. We thought this could be a total bomb. But we went to Texas, and it was extraordinary. We knew even before we filmed [Boys State] that Girls State needed to be part of this conversation. We weren’t sure where we would make it, but we knew why.
What does Girls State reflect about the state of political polarization in the United States? What perceptions does it uphold, and what does it debunk?
Amanda McBaine: When we were casting the people we were going to follow through the week, we ended up talking to hundreds of kids, and in talking to them about their politics, it was really interesting—this is true in Boys State, too—how few of them identified as one party or the other. They hadn’t yet had to vote—to be forced to actually check a box—so their politics seemed to be more à la carte. They seemed to identify more as independents. And they were open to listening to one another in a way that I knew that they were just more excited to have those conversations than I feel like I hear of my contemporaries. So I think that gave me a feeling of hope that we can hearken back to that space of not being put into two tribes and remember the humanity of it all.
Moss: It was a question for us, too: Do girls do things differently? We watched how the boys behaved in Boys State, and I won’t spoil the film for you, but I’ll say this, it’s pretty tribal. There’s a lot of chest-thumping and push-ups. You see dirty tricks. We had people say to us, “Oh, with girls, it’s going to be Mean Girls, or it’s going to be a catfight,” but that’s not at all what we saw. We saw girls who wanted to engage in healthy civil discourse. Who are incredibly ambitious and fortified in their own political positions but also are not kind of rigid in the ways that adults are, or tribal in the ways they imagined forming connections with each other. We saw friendships form across divisions that were really kind of surprising. We didn’t see that in Boys State.
Talk to me about Emily Worthmore. How did you land on her as a protagonist?
McBaine: Jesse likes to say that a lot of these kids chose themselves, and I think it’s true.
Emily, from the minute she started talking—she opened with “I want to run for president,” and she said it in a way that was just startling. She meant it. She has a website with a ticker of how many days before she turns the age when she can start campaigning. I just loved the confidence and joy; that she was leaping into this. Also, she’s a conservative kid, and that’s different from my politics. So already, the civil discourse project was happening in us having a dialogue. I really love this kid. She’s extraordinary. But her politics are not mine. And that’s an interesting thing, to root for a person when that’s the dynamic that we have.
Moss: Not even to root for them, but to not cut them off. To say, “OK, I’m gonna give myself permission to listen to you and to go on a journey with you.”
The Supreme Court’s Dobbs opinion was leaked soon before the events of Girls State took place. Did that change how you shaped the film? Did abortion end up being a bigger focus because of it?
McBaine: Abortion has been a conversation at Girls State sessions for many years. It’s one of those political debates that’s going to come up. One of the reasons we were interested in going to a Girls State program was because they build the third branch of government, the Supreme Court. Boys State in Texas doesn’t have that.
We couldn’t have known that this leaked opinion was going to be released right before the girls convened in Missouri, where there was a trigger law. We couldn’t have known the stakes were going to be that high or that it was going to feel that emotional and electric. But you sure hope, as a documentarian, that you land in those moments in time when things are kind of in a pressure cooker.
Moss: I think what’s fascinating about these programs, because they’re so big and so diverse, is that they’re very sensitive instruments to the changing weather of our political system. We had heard the boys talking about abortion, but they were sort of scared because they knew without women there to be part of the conversation it really wasn’t right. So I think in some ways, the timing [of Girls State] was sort of accidentally charged. We are interested in filming these programs because they are forums for conversation about issues that divide us as a country.
I listened to the Supreme Court argument this morning on abortion. Where are we headed? For us as filmmakers, it’s about finding a way to have a conversation that brings people to the table, particularly young people. Teenagers watched Boys State. It’s kind of amazing, our own kids, our teenage daughters, watched it.
McBaine: They gave it a thumbs-up. That’s never happened in the history of parenting.
How did you go about bringing intersectionality into Girls State?
Moss: I’ll say a couple of things. The permission we gave ourselves with this film versus Boys State was to have more voices and to not limit the number of protagonists. Boys State has four subjects; this film has seven. We felt that there were more perspectives that needed to be present and that it was OK if the story got a little bit messy. Following the races for governor and Supreme Court meant that we could watch the women in this film, particularly the women of color, navigate the space in their own distinct ways. It was important for us to spend as much time as we did casting the film to represent the diversity of perspectives of Missouri girlhood.
I think, in particular, to see Maddie, who identifies as gay and who’s very left-wing, forge a very strong, supportive friendship with Emily, who is Christian and conservative and has very different politics from her—I think that is one definition of intersectionality that’s important to see.
For young people, perhaps it represents their everyday lives. But for an older generation that has more conservative assumptions about how young people engage in politics and form friendships and how they present their identities, I think it’s really inspiring.
McBaine: This is a bigger conversation, but the program itself is quite old-fashioned. It’s been around for a long time. It’s gender segregated. This Missouri session was as close as they’d come to [changing that], in a parallel play and sharing some of their resources, and I think that’s the trajectory of where things are going. I don’t know because I don’t run these programs, but [I could imagine] a kind of People’s State emerging. And then there’ll be all kinds of interesting conversations about who can win in that space. I can only feel optimistic about all of it, because that’s my nature. But we’ll see.
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