The New Zealand film about being 14 and absolutely mortified is coming home

A New Zealand film about a teenager trying desperately to look older, cooler and less confused than she is has travelled through some of the world’s biggest film festivals. This feels right, because there may be no experience more internationally understood than being 14 and lying badly.

Big Girls Don’t Cry, the debut feature from Auckland filmmaker Paloma Schneideman, will open the New Zealand International Film Festival at The Civic on July 29. The film premiered at Sundance, screened at SXSW and BFI Flare, became a festival favourite and later won the Grand Prix at France’s Nouvelle Vagues festival before coming home. NZIFF has made it the opening-night film for its Aotearoa premiere.

The story follows 14-year-old Sid during the summer holidays of 2006 in a rural town near Ōmaha. She lives with her father and older sister, then becomes fascinated by Freya, an older American girl who appears to possess all the confidence Sid is currently attempting to manufacture. The film moves through desire, shame, class, identity and the terrible adolescent knowledge that everyone may be able to see exactly how hard you are trying.

The setting matters because 2006 sat in a strange little gap. The internet was already inside teenage life, but it had not yet followed everyone into every room. There was MSN, dial-up, reality television and enough online access to become curious, while humiliation could still take several hours to travel.

That makes it recent enough to feel familiar and distant enough to seem almost peaceful. Teenagers could still reinvent themselves during the summer without someone immediately locating photographic evidence of the previous version. They could lie, perform, disappear for an afternoon and return home with the story only slightly damaged.

The film has not opened publicly here yet, so this is not a review disguised as certainty. What already makes its journey interesting is the specificity of the thing that has travelled. Big Girls Don’t Cry is not a generic coming-of-age story placed in New Zealand for scenery. Its era, beaches, rural social world and particular version of teenage awkwardness appear to be the reason international audiences have responded.

That should not be surprising, although the New Zealand screen industry is sometimes encouraged to believe local stories must become less local before the rest of the world can understand them. Every successful film then has to reteach the same lesson: people connect to emotional truth, and emotional truth usually becomes more convincing when it happens somewhere specific.

Schneideman developed the film after taking part in A Wave in the Ocean, a filmmaking programme led by Jane Campion and Philippa Campbell, who became executive producers. Newcomer Ani Palmer plays Sid, alongside Rain Spencer and Noah Taylor. The film’s festival run has placed a first-time lead actor and a debut feature director in rooms where New Zealand work is usually discussed only after someone becomes famous elsewhere.

There is something especially satisfying about the film returning as NZIFF’s opening night after its international run. New Zealand is very good at waiting for overseas approval before noticing its own artists, and technically that has happened again here. At least this time the gap was short.

The better story is that a small, specific film about girlhood in early-2000s Aotearoa did not need to become louder or more universal to travel. It appears to have gone overseas carrying dial-up internet, beach-town boredom, queer longing and the awful feeling that everybody older than you has received instructions for life that somehow never arrived at your house.

The rest of us can finally watch it on July 29. Anyone who was 14 in 2006 may wish to bring a support person.