What would American democracy look like in the hands of teenage girls?

Apple TV debuted the official trailer for Girls State, the follow-up documentary to the award-winning 2020 film Boys State, now following teenage girls from Missouri navigating a week-long democratic experiment Girls State, learning how to build a government from the ground up.

Boys State also had its world premiere at Sundance Film Festival, where it won the U.S. Documentary Competition Grand Jury Prize. The film later was released on Apple TV+ where it won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Special.

Release Date

Directed and produced by award-winning filmmakers Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine (Boys State, The Mission), Girls State world premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, and begins streaming globally on Apple TV+ April 5, 2024.

Synopsis

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?

Girls State follows 500 teenage girls from across Missouri as they 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 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.

Reviews

Guardian review gave the film 4 of 5 stars, writing, “As with Boys State, the directors smartly take a back seat, catching the pieces as they fall. The film’s chief enjoyment is seeing how motivations transform, and character is forged, through the sliding doors of new people, victories and losses, and the sharpening of the young women’s disparate judgments on the genuinely disappointing differences between boys and girls state. The apparent aimlessness of the week’s first half coalesces into a point: these are not the same programs.”

Official Trailer

Watch Official Trailer for Girls State.