What do these four characters have in common: an exiled architect, an imprisoned mural artist, an educator ahead of his time and a Girl Scout under Girl Scouts of the USA?<\/p>\n
If you guessed that they can all be classified as \u201cindividuals in institutions,\u201d you\u2019d be correct. Another commonality is that they\u2019re each subjects of director Alysa Nahmias, the soon-to-be-a-household-name director of \u201cCookie Queens,\u201d which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.<\/p>\n
Hours before the film\u2019s SFFilm premiere, The Daily Californian sat down with Nahmias to chat about mastering upselling before mastering your Rs.<\/p>\n
Every January to April, 1 million salt-of-the-earth Americans don their sashes to generate $800 million for Girl Scouts of the USA. Ara, Shannon Elizabeth, Nikki and Olive are just four contributing to the pot, each with their own varying cookie-selling goals. Of course, the nonfiction narrative that \u201cCookie Queens\u201d spins depends on the active pursuit of these monetary goals, but Nahmias\u2019 flawless casting and direction turns each girl\u2019s target number into a proxy for something greater. Sure, Shannon Elizabeth wants to sell 2,750 boxes of Thin Mints, Tagalongs and Samoas, but what does she really want?<\/p>\n
\u201cWith each of their stories I wanted to have an outer journey of \u2018Will they sell this or will they not?\u2019\u201d Nahmias elaborated. \u201cAll of that is fine, but really, it\u2019s \u2018will you be able to belong to your sisterhood?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
In the case of Shannon Elizabeth, selling 2,750 boxes is the only way her parents could afford to send her to Girl Scout camp. Nahmias\u2019 documentation of the family\u2019s progressive dispositional shift as the season\u2019s end creeps closer is deft. Living where few can afford the luxury of a $6 box of Girl Scout Cookies means little to show for the afternoons Shannon Elizabeth spends selling. Watching her parents go from nervously optimistic to reckoning with the truth that Girl Scout camp is an impossibility is devastating.<\/p>\n
Five-year-old Ara\u2019s goal is a little less flashy \u2014 55.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor Ara, it was a little bit about learning the rules of the game,\u201d Nahmias explained. \u201cCan she master this new thing? She\u2019s trying a new thing (in an) age group all about developmental independence and mastery.\u201d<\/p>\n
Watching Ara, it\u2019s easy to see that she\u2019s grappling not with a social challenge of selling enough Girl Scout cookies, but with the weight of a challenge, period.<\/p>\n
\u201cThings I was looking for (in casting) \u2014 they had to be passionate about cookie sales, but it didn\u2019t have to be a big number,\u201d Nahmias said. \u201cThat\u2019s how we found someone like Ara. Her goal is not a huge number on paper; if it was a reality competition show, they probably would have thrown her out. But for me, her last year\u2019s goal was five, and this time it\u2019s 55? That\u2019s 11 times more.\u201d<\/p>\n
Similarly ambitious is 12-year-old Olive, who holds North Carolina\u2019s state record of 12,801 boxes sold in a single season.<\/p>\n
\u201cWith Olive too, we were looking at this story \u2014 which I deeply relate to \u2014 of perfectionism,\u201d Nahmias divulged. \u201cHow do we know when it\u2019s enough? What if we have more capacity? Should we push ourselves? Who\u2019s pushing us \u2014 is it ourselves or is it the world? And she says, maybe it\u2019s both.\u201d<\/p>\n
And hence, \u201cindividuals in institutions.\u201d Considering the film\u2019s happy-go-lucky title and the poster\u2019s Barbie-pink boulevard, it may be tough to imagine \u201cCookie Queens\u201d as anything other than frictionless, but Nahmias\u2019 depiction remains a critical endorsement.<\/p>\n
\u201cSome institutions are heavier or even dark, like the carceral system in the United States or Cuba in the 1960s, but Girl Scouts is also an institution,\u201d Nahmias said. \u201cI\u2019m looking at that dark sort of dynamic, but through the lens of childhood, which I think gives it a kind of lightness that\u2019s wonderful.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cCookie Queens\u201d is absolutely pro-Girl Scouts, but that doesn\u2019t mean it necessarily has to be pro-Girl Scouts of the USA. Each box of Girl Scout Cookies is $6. Just one of those dollars goes to the scout who sold it; the rest goes right back to \u201cbig Girl Scout\u201d \u2014 Girl Scouts of the USA. Throughout the film, each girl bears this weight in one way or another, and some even choose to push back. Presenting such adult themes through the unserious lens of a cookie seems entirely non-intuitive, but those themes were only present because the girls wanted them to be.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wanted to let the girls be as funny and silly (as they wanted) and let the cookiness of it all be there, but also to let the challenges and the pressures and the ways that they\u2019re learning about the economy and their value inform the whole way through,\u201d Nahmias detailed.<\/p>\n
By allowing the girls to take the lead, \u201cCookie Queens\u201d is, in fact, fundamentally intuitive and the feel-good movie of the year. If you see one movie in all of 2026, let it be this one.<\/p>\n
\u201cCookie Queens\u201d opens in theaters Friday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What do these four characters have in common: an exiled architect, an imprisoned mural artist, an educator ahead…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":315069,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[35323,35324,118347,9,24,63,122,124,123,118884,49968],"class_list":["post-315068","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-alysa-nahmias","tag-cookie-queens","tag-girl-scouts-of-the-usa","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news","tag-sffilm","tag-sundance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315068","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=315068"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/315068\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/315069"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=315068"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=315068"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=315068"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}