It's a Girl's World
2004 · 52m · Canada
Directed by Lynn Glazier
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary
Tones: contemplative, dark, provocative
Popular 10-year-old girls use shunning, whispering and rumour to gain social power, while parents confront the harm, contrasted with a 14-year-old who died by suicide after months of bullying.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects this to be a cautionary horror show about mean girls, so Glazier's refusal to let the camera linger on victimhood—her insistence on the *mechanics* of cruelty instead—actually pisses off the consensus. Smart move.
A formally restrained documentary that resists the sensationalism its premise invites, instead situating itself in the rigorous tradition of social observation that traces back through Wiseman and the Maysles—the editing knows exactly when to cut, and when to hold.
The choice to give airtime to the perpetrators without moral pleading, to let their casual articulation of power expose the architecture underneath, is the small decision that transforms this from PSA into something that actually makes you *think* about how social violence works.