Girls Grow Teeth
2026 · 2m
Directed by Theo Petersen
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, provocative
A girl takes her first step into the real world — she will put on her headscarf, perfume herself, share her location with a friend, and finally push open the door of a bar; that day she learns that what she thought ordinary is neither affection nor interest but domination, and once teeth grow in, there is no going back.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most coming-of-age films genuflect to innocence-lost clichés, but Petersen flips the script entirely—the ritual of self-presentation (headscarf, perfume, location-sharing) becomes the exact machinery of predation, and that inversion is genuinely unsettling in a way that feels necessary rather than gratuitous.
There's a deliberate formalism at work here, where each gesture of feminine preparation is staged as both intimate ritual and coercive performance, situating itself in dialogue with works examining the social construction of womanhood—the compressed runtime demands surgical precision in every cut.
The metaphor of teeth growing in as the moment of irreversible awareness is the fulcrum that makes this work; it's a single image that reframes the entire two minutes from coming-of-age as loss into coming-of-age as weaponization, and Petersen trusts it enough to let it breathe.