Tracy Flick<\/a>-in-training if ever there was one, scrunches up her face in confusion as she struggles to understand why so much of her earnings are garnished is still cute. Nahmias\u2019 no-interview, straight-up observational doc method keeps the focus on the girls, so we learn almost nothing about Olive\u2019s family except what can be gleaned when they share the frame with the subjects. That means we barely even know Olive\u2019s mother\u2019s name, let alone what she and Olive\u2019s dad \u2014 who directs Olive\u2019s appeals videos, and gives tough notes after each take \u2014 do for a living. <\/p>\n\n\tBut Olive\u2019s mom is also one of the troop leaders, so she\u2019s clearly more invested than most parents in cookie campaigning. The lady certainly seems to protest too much when she insists that the push to beat records comes \u201call from Olive,\u201d who seems pretty over the whole grind in the last act of the film. When she\u2019s finally broken her personal sales record by shilling 9,000 cookies, securing her title as North Carolina state champion, and mom suggests that making a round 10,000 would be so cool, some viewers may feel concerned that everything\u2019s alright in that home.<\/p>\n
\n\tThankfully, Olive has the unconditional support of her best friend Celia K., a hyper-articulate, adorably intense scene-stealer whose loyalty to her friend is truly moving. We can but hope there will be a follow-up film that catches up with these girls five or 10 years from now as they launch their political careers or start their first Fortune 500 company together. Also, that spotlight on female friendship is reassuring since two of the other girls in the film seem more isolated and alone. <\/p>\n
\n\tThat\u2019s less the case with eight-year-old Shannon Elizabeth S., a part Latino, part Native American girl living in El Paso, Texas. She has her fellow Brownies to hang with, but clearly she\u2019s most attached to her mother and her mom\u2019s partner Sushi, who help Shannon Elizabeth work every flea market and parking lot so she can sell enough to win a trip to summer camp, a prize far beyond the family\u2019s means.<\/p>\n
\n\tLittle aforementioned Ara, on the other hand, seems like a more solitary spirit, although we do see a precious scene where she tries to teach her younger brother how to hold as many boxes of cookies as his little arms can manage. But when not working the seafront near her San Diego home on cookie-selling duty, Ara seems to be in a beautiful, pastel-colored world of her own. Like Celia, she\u2019s unnervingly well-spoken for her age, but also able to do numeric calculations well beyond her years and an accomplished pianist, tinkling out a Bach minuet with impressive precision.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe kid with the most complicated family dynamics is easily nine-year-old Chino, California, resident Nikki B., the youngest of three who desperately wants to be considered an equal by her older sisters Nala and Nyah. A Black family in a predominantly white community, the girls and their own troop-leader mother seem to have embraced the Girl Scout way and cookie-selling success as a means of building status, along with courting validation with beauty. Both older sisters, now more focused on cheerleading than scouting, have complicated make-up regimens, required to service their devotion to making TikTok videos, a lifestyle Nikki longs to be a part of. <\/p>\n
\n\tHer dedication to cookie-selling is one way she can prove her worth to the whole family, as her aim is to earn a prize trip to Europe. And, though it might be of less monetary value, to bring home a trophy as big as the one an elder sister once earned. Luckily, Nikki\u2019s youth, sunny disposition and agreeableness are her own superpower, making her the \u201chook,\u201d as the girls describe her, because other people consider her \u201cstill cute\u201d \u2014 unlike her older sisters, who have apparently nearly aged out of cookie-selling.<\/p>\n
\n\tWith all four girls, the life lesson that selling Girl Scout cookies offers is irrevocably bound up with late-stage capitalism. Tasty-morsel entrepreneurship stands in here for a modern kind of Protestant work ethic, but gets sprinkled with the sense that cuteness, like beauty for older women, is a commodity in itself that the possessor can exploit to their own advantage. At the same time, all the girls seem to have subconsciously absorbed that guilt-tripping potential customers is part of the game, luring in marks with pity for the vendor\u2019s disadvantages (poverty, not being white, having a disability) in a culture overwhelmingly rigged to favor girls like, well, white middle-class Olive.<\/p>\n
\n\tAs the above may suggest, it\u2019s very easy for viewers to read into Nahmias\u2019 film all kinds of subtexts that the filmmakers might have intended. But there is some subtle direction in what Nahmias and her editing team have chosen to include, and resonances and discordances they draw out between the different families. Meanwhile, Antonio Cisneros\u2019 warmly lit, subtly humorous cinematography adds a softness to proceedings, like powdered sugar on a fresh batch of cookies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At one point in Cookie Queens, a highly engaging documentary about four Girl Scouts selling cookies, the film\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":112501,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[3056,9,24,63,122,124,123,49968,49702,35325,49704],"class_list":{"0":"post-112500","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-queens","8":"tag-festivals","9":"tag-new-york","10":"tag-new-york-city","11":"tag-nyc","12":"tag-queens","13":"tag-queens-headlines","14":"tag-queens-news","15":"tag-sundance","16":"tag-sundance-2026","17":"tag-sundance-film-festival","18":"tag-sundance-film-festival-reviews"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112500","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=112500"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112500\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/112501"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=112500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}