Big Girls Don't Cry

Name: New Zealand Film Commission
Price range: $

14-year-old Sid Bookman discovers desire, identity, and the internet as she imitates the people she longs to be loved by.

New Zealand Production

2026 Drama 100 minutes

Summer 2006.

In a small beach town north of Auckland, 14-year-old Sid is determined to reinvent herself. As she navigates friendship, first love, identity and belonging, one unforgettable summer forces her to confront the messy realities of growing up.

"Paloma Schneideman, mentored through Jane Campion’s film program, crafts an artful coming-of-age portrait of queer adolescence that beautifully inhabits the liminal space between youth and adulthood, desire and experience — a time when we’re conscious of everything, but lacking language for any of it...

Schneideman’s voice is fresh and vibrant, her intimate, shallow-focus photography drawn to faces and bodies, full of precarity and vulnerability and perfectly attuned to these young people. The film breathes with specificity and authenticity, ironically rendering so sharply an interior life that is, by its nature, so obscure."

— John Nein, Senior Programmer and Director of Strategic Initiatives for Sundance Film Festival

(L-R): Rain Spencer, Noah Taylor, writer/director Paloma Schneideman, and Ani Palmer, pictured at Deadline Studio during the Sundance Film Festival.