Apple Original Films has announced the documentary feature Girls State, directed and produced by award-winning filmmakers Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine (Boys State, The Mission) and Academy Award winner Davis Guggenheim’s Concordia Studio. Girls State will premiere on Apple TV+ on April 5, 2024.
After the widely celebrated Emmy Award-winning documentary Boys State, also produced by Moss, McBaine, and Concordia, made its buzzy premiere at Sundance in 2020, the inevitable question arose: What about Girls State?
The documentary follows 500 teenage girls from across Missouri who gather for a week-long immersion in an elaborate laboratory of democracy, where they build a government from the ground up, campaign for office, and form a Supreme Court to weigh the most divisive issues of the day.
In Girls State, the country is now deeper into a democratic crisis, with civil discourse and electoral politics increasingly fragile under ever more extreme political polarization. As questions of race and gender equality in a representational democracy reach a fever pitch, these young women confront the complicated paths women must navigate to build political power.
Following a distinctly female perspective and filled with teenage insecurity, biting humor, and a yearning for true friendship, the young leaders of Girls State win hearts and minds – not just elections.
“In these turbulent times, we were inspired and moved by the young women we met at Missouri ‘Girls State’ and the stories that emerged in one eventful week. ‘Girls State’ is very much a ‘sibling’ — singular and surprising but also related to ‘Boys State’ in its prescient portrait of young people coming of age in this political moment,” said Moss and McBaine.
Girls State is a Concordia Studio presentation of a Mile End Films production.
Following its debut at Sundance, the ground-breaking documentary Boys State was broadly acclaimed, earning accolades including the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special; two Critics Choice Documentary Award wins including Best Political Documentary; the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize; the SXSW Film Festival Louis Black/Lone Star Award; and a DGA Award nomination, among many other honors.
Girls State joins the award-winning slate of Apple Original documentary films, including Guggenheim’s STILL: A Michael J. Fox Movie, also produced by Concordia Studio, which recently swept the Critics Choice Documentary Awards with five wins after having been nominated for seven Emmy Awards, the most nominations for any nonfiction film or series this year.
Other acclaimed Apple Original documentaries include The Pigeon Tunnel, a Critics Choice Documentary Award nominee that pulls back the curtain on the storied life and career of former British spy David Cornwell, and Stephen Curry: Underrated, the remarkable coming-of-age story of one of the most influential, dynamic, and unexpected players in the history of basketball.
There’s also the NAACP Image Award-winning film Sidney, honoring the legendary Sidney Poitier and his legacy as an iconic actor, filmmaker, and activist; Emmy Award-nominated film Selena Gomez: My Mind & Me, a uniquely raw and intimate documentary spanning her six-year journey into a new light; a new upcoming documentary film about the groundbreaking life and career of seven-time Formula One world champion Sir Lewis Hamilton; and many more.
Mirko Parlevliet has been reporting on the entertainment industry since 1998 and founded Vital Thrills in 2018 to cover the latest news on streaming, movies, TV, and video games.