When filmmakers Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss first spoke with friends about the focus of their Apple TV+ documentary Girls State — a companion piece to their Emmy- and Sundance-winning 2020 documentary Boys State — they were surprised to hear about the expectations it conjured in their minds.
Following 500 teenage girls from Missouri as they navigate a weeklong immersion in a sophisticated democratic laboratory where they build a government from the ground up to address the most contentious issues of the day, the film would surely come down, the friends predicted, to mean girls looking, in Moss’ words, “to tear each other apart.” In reality, in spite of the political polarization that defines the U.S.
today, the situation at Missouri Girls State was altogether different. RELATED: Contenders TV Docs + Unscripted – Deadline’s Full Coverage Participants “actually do politics a little differently than you might expect from a teenage film.
I think it’s a trope, actually, and they’re really interested to hear from people whose politics are different than their own,” Moss said on a panel with McBaine at Deadline’s Contenders Television: Documentary + Unscripted awards-season event. “They’re open, they’re changing.
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