Girls Together
2024 · 16m · UK
Directed by Christie Arnold
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
On the last day of summer, three fourteen-year-old best friends — Rena, Zep, and Lauren — return to the wooded fort they've built each year from discarded furniture, where a chance encounter with a fox surfaces the fragility of their bond on the cusp of adolescence.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a coming-of-age film about three girls and a fox—exactly the kind of premise that makes most programmers nod politely—but Arnold refuses to let sentiment do the heavy lifting, instead letting awkwardness and fractured attention spans speak louder than any monologue about growing apart could.
The film sits comfortably in a lineage of formally precise youth cinema—Céline Sciamma's precision comes to mind—where the editing rhythm mirrors emotional rupture and the natural world functions as both symbol and counterpoint to human intimacy.
The stroke of genius here is using the fox's wariness as a narrative compass: every time it tenses or retreats, we understand something about the girls' unspoken fears without a single line of dialogue spelling it out, and that economy of gesture is what elevates this from precious to genuinely moving.