Girlhood
Produced & Directed by Liz Garbus
Produced by Rory Kennedy
Edited by Mary Manhardt
Photographed by Tony Hardmon
Original Music by Theodore Shapiro
Head of Production: Julie Gaither
Co-Producer/Sound: Amy Goodman
2003 Audience Award Winner, South by Southwest Film Festival
2003 Audience Award Winner at the Nantucket Film Festival
2003 Jury Award Winner at the Atlanta Film Festival
"Powerful"
A.O. Scott, The New York Times
"Garbus brilliantly and nimbly pulls the layers back on juvenile justice statistics to reveal complicated, infuriating, and finally (and surprisingly) enchanting human beings. As a result, Girlhood is one of the most haunting and important films of the year."
Ernest Hardy, LA Weekly
Girlhood tells two coming-of-age stories from the real America: Shanae, ten years old when she was gang-raped by five boys, responded by drinking and drugging, and then graduated to murder, with the stabbing death of a friend, at age 11. Megan, whose mother abandoned her to turn tricks to support her ravaging heroin addiction, ran away from ten different foster homes before being arrested for attacking another foster child with a box cutter. Both girls ended up in the Waxter Juvenile Facility, home to Maryland's most violent juvenile offenders. It is here that their journeys really begin.
With unprecedented access to the system and to the complex interior lives of the protagonists, Girlhood follows Shanae and Megan over the next three years of their lives, as they struggle to come to terms with their crimes, their pasts, and their futures. One of them will graduate from high school at #4 in her class, having made her way through the minefield of her childhood and even greater crises to come; another will find herself trapped by the demons of her upbringing, on the streets of East Baltimore, still searching for salvation. But both will struggle to come of age in an America in which childhood, as we would all like to imagine it, is in shorter and shorter supply. A story of mothers and daughters, crime and its consequences, and ceaseless striving in the face of inconceivable adversity, Girlhood is a testament to the faith and struggles of two young girls just trying to grow up.
A Moxie Firecracker Film for TLC
Aired on TLC in the Fall of 2004