In 2018, film-makers Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine struck gold – or, rather, tuned into it – when they attended a weeklong Texas program in which 1,000 teenage boys elect and run a mock state government. Their subsequent film, Boys State, bottled the potential and peril of the future – the idealism and ambition of youth, the capacity to change one’s mind, the allure of power, the corrosive codes of masculinity – into two hours at once terrifying and hopeful, winning the 2020 Sundance documentary grand jury prize.
Now the duo returns to the festival with Girls State, a similarly structured look at a Boys State sister program in Missouri. Though the mock government programs, run by the American Legion, remain (controversially, to some) separated by sex in the state, the film captures the first time in its 80-year history that the two coexist on the same campus, at the same time, in the summer of 2022. For the boys, it’s business as usual, relayed in occasional snippets familiar from the first project – exercises on a football field, delegate meetings, rituals blessed by real-life politicians.
