Girlhood | Onassis Foundation

Onassis Culture initiates a dialogue between the world we live in and worlds we wish to live in. With a series of new documentaries, it triggers discussions around topics that matter to us, focusing on individual and collective reality, on personal stories worth sharing, on dreams, experiences, and new narratives.

How does it feel to be a girl today? How do you get accepted by ruthless peers? How do you deal with sexism? Is there anything more valuable than friendship? How do teenage girls experience the quarantine? Webex classes, Zoom calls, TV shows, TikTok dances, insomnia, diets, stress, concerns, dreams, and realizations.

Girlhood (2021) by Vania Turner and Maria Sidiropoulou, an Onassis Culture commission and production, follows the lives of three 17-year-old girls in a central neighborhood of Athens and their hard way to adulthood in quarantine-imposed isolation.

Tough, responsible, and mature beyond her years, Christina shares a room with her brother, helps her mother with the housework, and yearns more than anything to leave home and gain her independence. Brave Vera is insecure about her weight and longs for acceptance, while also yearning for a more inclusive world. And strong-willed Nefeli, a competitive dancer, discovers feminism and stops hanging out with boys.

This coming-of-age story shows familiar images of teenagers who dream of their independence, struggle with eating disorders and sexism, while also trying to find out how to love themselves. Glued to their screens, Christina, Vera, and Nefeli find refuge in one another and patiently wait to graduate from high school.

According to the creators of the film, Vania Turner and Maria Sidiropoulou: «We wanted to capture how the pandemic’s isolation shaped the ups and downs of adolescence for three girls who come of age in a society that remains deeply patriarchal. With the camera being there only to observe, our objective was to document their daily life without intervening, to listen to them without judging them, aiming to showcase how sexism invades every aspect of their lives, and to trigger honest discussions about how girls and boys grow up today. The issues raised in the film, such as coming of age, social media use, eating disorders, the role and the performativity of genders, and so forth, emerged naturally over time in the conversations we had with them on camera, mostly to our surprise. This is the charm of documentary, after all; this is what gets you hooked.”

GIRLHOOD just started its festival journey and is already selected by several international festivals in Greece and abroad. From the National Competition section at the 44th Drama International Short Film Festival (DISFF44) to the “Greek Short Stories” in Competition section at the 27th Athens International Film Festival; from the official Competition section at the 8th Peloponnisos International Documentary Film Festival to the 4th Athens International Children’s Film Festival.

Moreover, it was selected by the greatest International Children’s Film Festival in the world and one of only two Academy Award-qualifying children’s film festivals, the 38th Chicago International Children's Film Festival (CICFF), which will take place in November 2021.

Directors: Vania Turner and Maria Sidiropoulou

Script, Editor, Sound, Director of Photography: Vania Turner

Creative Production, Research: Maria Sidiropoulou

Executive Producer: Laika Productions

Music Composer: Miss Trichromi

Sound Designer: Stelios Koupetoris

Colourist: Aggelos Matzios / MetaPost

Colorist Assistant: Foivos Petikas

An Onassis Culture Production

Meet the filmakers

Vania Turner (b. 1989) is a Greek-British director, editor, DOP, and journalist. She has filmed humanitarian crises and displacement emergencies in the Middle East, Europe, and sub-Saharan Africa Based in Kenya, where she lived and worked until the outbreak of the pandemic, in recent years she mostly documented the impact of forced displacement, due to armed conflicts, climate change, and destitution, as well as its gendered aspects. She has covered topics such as the torture of civilians by ISIS in northern Iraq, the resurgence of child marriage in Kenya due to climate change, child labor in Congo, and the rescue of migrants in the most deadly migration route, the Central Mediterranean. Her work has appeared in various outlets including the ‘Guardian’ and ‘Time’ magazine. She is a graduate of the LSE where she received an MSc Political Theory, and holds a BA with First Class Honours in English Literature from the University of Warwick..

She is a member of the Video Consortium and the Frontline Freelance Register, an international body of freelance journalists who are exposed to risk at their work. She is currently working on a feature-length documentary dealing with issues of gender-based violence, sexism, and power abuse.

Maria Sidiropoulou (b. 1988) is a Greek documentary producer, director, and journalist. She has produced documentary series for ARTE and ‘Vice’ Greece, amongst others. She worked as an investigative reporter and producer on some of the country’s most renowned current affairs shows for the better part of a decade before deciding to work independently. Her documentary “I only see in me the sea” was selected by Thessaloniki’s International Film Festival and Drama’s International Short Film Festival in 2019. She’s a fellow of the Thomson Reuters Foundation and received a grant to participate in Columbia University's Journalism Video Program in 2017.

ONASSIS FOUNDATION – CINEMA

The Onassis Foundation consistently loves and supports cinema, it becomes part of the artistic creation, it supports acclaimed and aspiring artists, through script development and production of short and feature films. It embraces the process of creation, research and artistic development, offering scholarships and fellowships to filmmakers. It collaborates with major organizations.

TO FIND OUT MORE ABOUT @girlhoodthefilm visit the official website of the film and follow it on Instagram and Facebook.