Filmmakers: Lara De Araujo Machado, Pin-Chieh Pan, Carmel Wilkinson-Ayre

Country: UK

Run Time:00:01:02

Year: 2020

Originally produced in March 2020, the hypothetical exhibition Becoming a Woman: Navigating the Complex World of Girl Teen Film was split into three sections that focused on the history of Girl Teen Film, the depiction of teenage girls bedrooms and the discourse surrounding the genre. Despite the fact that Girl Teen Film is being largely ignored in academia and film theory for being “silly and trivial”, primary research into the popularity of these films illustrates that teenagers from countries such as Brazil, China, Malaysia, Singapore and the UK are heavily influenced by Girl Teen Film. ‘Becoming a Woman’ was proposed to explore this influence of these films, and how they affect our societal understanding of teenage girls and young women.

The exhibition charts the history of Girl Teen Film from the 1950s to the present and includes significant objects from popular films. Touching on topics such as the #MeToo movement, sexism in the film industry and the global representation of women, Becoming a Woman aimed to diversify the genre and question the privileged contexts, narrow concepts and stereotypic ideals proposed.