{"id":112019,"date":"2026-01-25T18:22:22","date_gmt":"2026-01-25T18:22:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/112019\/"},"modified":"2026-01-25T18:22:22","modified_gmt":"2026-01-25T18:22:22","slug":"a-skeptical-documentary-about-girl-scout-cookies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/112019\/","title":{"rendered":"A Skeptical Documentary About Girl Scout Cookies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alysa Nahmias\u2019 \u201cCookie\u00a0Queens\u201d (EP\u2019d by the real-life royal duo of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle<\/a>) follows an ethnically and economically diverse, too-cute-for-words quartet of girls, ages five to 12, during Girl Scout\u00a0cookie<\/a>\u00a0season. It\u2019s that most consumerist time of the year when troop members race to hawk as many Thin Mints and Do-si-dos over a six-week period in order to reach their individual predetermined sales goals (and thus win prizes, including international trips for the highest earners). <\/p>\n

The eldest of the ones we meet is Olive, a fair-skinned blonde wise beyond her years. She\u2019s also the best of the best in her high-selling, Charlotte, NC middle school troop. Next is nine-year-old Nikki, a Black girl in a majority-white community in Chino, CA. Nikki is actually a \u201cJuliette\u201d \u2014 an independent Girl Scout \u2014 who idolizes her teenage sisters Nyah and Nala, top-sellers in an older troop co-led by their mom. Then there\u2019s Shannon Elizabeth of El Paso, Texas, an eight-year-old who like Nikki is a Brownie and a girl of color (in this case Latinx and Native American). But unlike Nikki, who covets a huge trophy and perhaps even a trip to Europe, Shannon Elizabeth needs to sell\u00a0cookies just to afford the price of summer camp. Finally, the youngest is Ara, another Californian, who at age five is a Daisy. She\u2019s also a type one diabetic, and thus only gets to consume tiny amounts of her sugary wares.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an engaging if well-trodden setup, enhanced by the director\u2019s slick but artful aesthetics. Yet Nahmias (\u201cUnfinished Spaces\u201d) deploys this familiar formula, filled with colorful images and a jaunty score, in unexpected ways, patiently letting her protagonists deliver some\u00a0cookie-crumbling punches in the process. Take Olive, for instance, easily the most media-savvy of the bunch. Fluent in corporate-speak (the doc opens with her explaining upselling to her troop), she mentions to one customer that she wants to be a Supreme Court<\/a> Justice when she grows up; later, she privately offers that she likewise wants to form a group to fight for Girl Scout rights since\u00a0cookie-selling is \u201cbasically child labor.\u201d She sings a different tune in public, however, telling a smitten TV news anchor that she enjoys selling\u00a0cookies and \u201changing out with my friends and making memories.\u201d In a post-interview debrief with her bestie, Olive assesses the appearance as okay but \u201cnot really good for business.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Indeed, what\u2019s left offscreen is the fact that this purportedly entrepreneurial grit-building exercise is in fact a massive money-making racket for Big\u00a0Cookie\u00a0\u2014\u00a0to the tune of around $800 million in just those six weeks. While all four of the Scouts come from incredibly loving nuclear families, supportive to the point of often serving as social media advisors, one can\u2019t help but wonder how healthy this \u201cwholesome\u201d endeavor truly is. Although the organization\u2019s stated mission is to build \u201cgirls of courage, confidence, and character, who make the world a better place,\u201d GSA seems more the ideological\/indoctrinating capitalist equivalent of the USSR\u2019s Young Pioneers. (Which is especially egregious in the case of a young one like Shannon Elizabeth, whose working class parents find themselves foregoing mortgage payments to pay for the boxes of\u00a0cookies that their daughter then sells to benefit The Man.)<\/p>\n

And just as troubling is how acutely aware these girls are of the fact that they\u2019re not just selling\u00a0cookies but also themselves \u2014 specifically their \u201ccuteness\u201d \u2014 in order to make money. (And for Nikki, whose older siblings call her \u201cthe hook,\u201d a way to please them as well.) So perhaps it\u2019s not surprising when Olive begins to have a sort of existential crisis. She admits she doesn\u2019t really want to sell\u00a0cookies anymore, but being the top seller is her role in the troop, one that she thinks of as \u201ckind of like a job.\u201d If she gave that up she wonders, \u201cWhat would I be?\u201d Indeed, she\u2019s startlingly hyperconscious, to the point of knowing she\u2019s expected to play the part of straight-out-of-central-casting \u201cchild\u201d for the adults around her.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s tiny Ara, who practices her sales pitch by phone with her doting dad, assuring him that the best deal is 20 sandwich\u00a0cookies (\u201cso that\u2019s really 40\u00a0cookies\u201d). Unlike Olive and Nikki, whose overly involved mothers appear to be living vicariously through them, Ara\u2019s father is determined to let his daughter lead rather than pushing her to \u201cachieve.\u201d She also might be the true rebel of the bunch, as she doesn\u2019t seem to frankly give a damn how many Samoas she sells. She\u2019d just as soon play piano, do pilates, or bake her own sugar-free treats to sell to all the diabetic customers who have to count their carbs like she does. Which is fortunately the kind of entrepreneurial spirit that might one day put a corporate\u00a0cookie\u00a0monster out of business for good.<\/p>\n

\"Natalie<\/a> \"Rachel<\/a> <\/p>\n

Grade: B-<\/p>\n

\u201cCookie Queens<\/a>\u201d premiered at the 2026 Sundance<\/a> Film<\/a> Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.<\/p>\n

Want to stay up to date on IndieWire\u2019s film\u00a0reviews<\/a>\u00a0and critical thoughts?\u00a0Subscribe here<\/a>\u00a0to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings \u2014\u00a0all only available to subscribers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Alysa Nahmias\u2019 \u201cCookie\u00a0Queens\u201d (EP\u2019d by the real-life royal duo of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle) follows an ethnically…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":112020,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[35324,749,9,24,63,122,124,123,1108,49968],"class_list":{"0":"post-112019","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-queens","8":"tag-cookie-queens","9":"tag-film","10":"tag-new-york","11":"tag-new-york-city","12":"tag-nyc","13":"tag-queens","14":"tag-queens-headlines","15":"tag-queens-news","16":"tag-reviews","17":"tag-sundance"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112019","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=112019"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112019\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/112020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112019"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112019"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112019"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}