‘Cookie Queens’ Director Says Girl Scout Cookies Were “A Delicious Way In” to a Larger Conversation (Video)

In a year loaded with oppressively heavy and disspiriting documentaries, a breath of fresh air is Cookie QueensAlysa Nahmias’ chronicle of 4 girls’ efforts, in the face of differing kinds of misfortune, to fulfill their objectives throughout Girl Scouts cookie-selling season. The movie premiered at Sundance, won the audience award at SXSW and has actually ended up being the year’s highest-grossing non-celebrity doc.

In late October, Nahmias brought the movie to the SCAD Savannah Film Festival, where it evaluated in the fest’s popular Docs to Watch sidebar– followed by a Q&A that you can enjoy below — and throughout which she was likewise one 10 directors of impressive 2026 docs who appeared on the fest’s Doc to Watch Panel, moderated by yours genuinely.

Nahmias has actually been directing and producing docs for the previous 20 years. Her focus had actually long been on art and architecture, however her young kids pushed her to make something that they and their good friends might delight in. When a good friend stated to her his experience of being matched by a girl who then struck him as much as purchase a few of her Girl Scout cookies, she was quite sure that she discovered simply such a job.

Nahmias, who was never ever a Girl Scout herself (her mom was a Brownie), felt that narrating the journeys of a number of Girl Scouts throughout one cookie-selling season might be an automobile to check out girlhood, why ladies of any ages are ignored, and more. “I wasn’t in fact that thinking about the cookies,” she discusses. “The Girl Scouts of all of it was fantastic and a method– a scrumptious method. It was sort of honey on the razor’s edge of believing about what it suggests to be a lady in American industrialism.”

Nahmias met Girl Scouts of the USA, however eventually chose to make a movie independent of the country youth company that supervises Girl Scouts (and, by the way, was established back in 1912 in, of all locations, Savannah, Georgia). She set out to “cast” her movie with women representing a variety of racial and ethnic demographics, financial backgrounds, and location, eventually discovering 7 whose households would grant her recording them throughout a six-month stretch, throughout which Nahmias and her group continuously passed through the nation narrating them.

Stylistically, Nahmias was as motivated by scripted jobs about youth, such as The Florida Project Moonrise Kingdom and Petit Mamanas she was by documentaries, like Salesperson Mesmerized and Kids StateOne huge takeaway: she constantly shot from the kids’ POVs. In the end, Nahmias chose to eliminate the stories of 3 women and focus the movie on 4: Olive, a smooth-talking go-getter who has something of a tiger mother; Nikki, who imagines being as cool as her older sis; Shannon Elizabeth, the sweet kid of a financially-strapped couple; and Ara, a diabetic with a bright-eyed view of the world.

Some may presume that the movie is a competitors doc in which the women eventually cross courses, however in reality, they never ever fulfilled till after the movie was locked. “I was never ever thinking about the number of boxes the ladies offered,” Nahmias stresses. “I was constantly thinking about their inner journeys.”