Critics Campus 2026 participant Alexander Holiday speaks to Paloma Schneideman about liminality, visibility and interpersonal longing, as depicted in her stirringly bittersweet portrait of queer adolescence.

Paloma Schneideman’s debut feature, Big Girls Don’t Cry, is a queer coming-of-age story steeped in the dial-up era and set against regional Aotearoa / New Zealand. It follows 14-year-old Sid Bookman (played by first-time actor Ani Palmer) across a formative summer holiday in Ōmaha. We first meet Sid speaking to an older man on Omegle; he is naked and masturbating to her voice alone, as her Frutiger Aero–evoking webcam is taped over. Sid lies about her age and bra size, and slowly digests this man’s attraction to her – or the idea of her. “She’s both grossed out and intrigued. Sometimes those two things go hand in hand,” Schneideman explains. “The disgust isn’t even necessarily with this guy; part of it is directed towards herself, her own sexual curiosity.”

Throughout the film, Sid articulates much of her own sexuality through lies and denial. There is a sense that adolescent sexual identity, particularly in the burgeoning internet age, is developed through imagination and projection. Unpacking the guilt that this can engender in young women was a driving force for Schneideman:

I think that’s why I wanted to make this film so much: to start opening up that dialogue. I know that I harboured so much shame around it as a teenager. So did a lot of my friends and my community. We only started to unlock that shame – and start to accept it – when we started talking about it in our twenties.

Prior to its Australian premiere at MIFF, Schneideman returned home to Aotearoa for the New Zealand International Film Festival. Watching Big Girls with a local audience for the first time was “a profound experience”, Schneideman reflects: “The film almost doesn’t feel real until you show it to the people that it was made for.” Sid’s self-effacement is connected deeply to her unarticulated queerness, often emerging as a defence mechanism – “the lies [involve] some subconscious homophobia, internal homophobia”. Indeed, depending on who is looking and with what intentions, Sid seems to fluctuate between invisibility and hypervisibility. Her fabrications allow her to “mimic other people, trying on versions of herself”.

Driven by some latent attraction, Sid becomes fascinated with Lana (Beatrix Rain Wolfe), a pretty blonde who catches the same bus to school. Sid buys her way into Lana’s life through alcohol and cigarettes, scavenged from the leftovers of her emotionally intermittent father, Leo (Noah Taylor). But as the girls start spending time with three older boys on university break, this necessity dissolves. While they keep her around, the group doesn’t treat Sid as an equal. “At that age you’re experiencing your first taste of power dynamics,” Schneideman recollects. “In high school, there were all sorts of hierarchies, and hierarchies within hierarchies. There is a food chain at play, and they like to have someone adoring them.”

Big Girls Don’t Cry

Sid is also nursing a crush on an American university exchange student, Freya (Rain Spencer), who has the same blonde beach waves and bellybutton piercing as Lana. Freya ambiguously occupies both surrogate-older-sister and girl-next-door roles for Sid. Her resemblance to Lana, for Schneideman, was part of the film showing itself only through the process of making: “I’m a real believer in the subconscious. I kept finding these patterns in the film that I hadn’t written down, that just keep revealing themselves.” Sid takes Freya to the local creek, and when they dive into the water, the silt is so thick we can’t make out their bodies, even as the camera approaches them, half-submerged in the water. There is something private, fleeting and dreamlike about the moment. Then, the film hard-cuts to a crystal-clear pool, presenting an uninterrupted view of the teen bodies piling onto each other – more Beverly Hills than Ōmaha. This juxtaposition speaks to “that space between expectation and reality, the sense that the grass is always greener on the other side”; Schneideman “wanted to visually put the two worlds next to each other and ask the audience where they’d rather be”. The class element of Big Girls is often implicit, but the film takes care to show “these microaggressions and the unspoken impact on your sense of self”.

This is most obvious in Leo, who struggles with anger issues as a single parent. He harbours a dissatisfaction with his lot in life, having trained at art school but now mowing lawns in rich neighbourhoods six days a week. At Christmas, Leo gives Sid and her older sister, Adele (Tara Canton), an envelope of cash each, but gives Freya an unusually sentimental gift: a book of Dylan Thomas poems. “It’s a homage to my dad,” Schneideman explains, her own father being a lover of Bob Dylan and the poet who inspired him. “I wanted to give that dad character lots of layers and depth. In the wrong actor’s hands, he could be something quite dark. But I wanted to feel his story and his history.”

While Sid’s father is connected to the story, her mother is removed from it. In a fleeting scene, she phones home for Christmas and speaks to Adele in Ukrainian, which Sid can’t understand. “Sid really needs a maternal presence, and you can feel her longing for that throughout the film,” Schneideman says. “Even the phone lag makes them talk over each other; there’s no moment of genuine connection. To me, it adds to the potency of a girl just trying to be seen. It’s heartbreaking.”

Palmer superbly navigates Sid’s delicate balance of earnestness and insecurity. “Most of the director’s work is on the casting,” Schneideman says of her process working with her debutant lead.

Ani is in every scene in the film. My friend and mentor Jane Campion said to me that she needs to be entirely compelling, even when she’s just folding the washing. That was Ani from the moment I met her. I felt her curiosity, something wise behind the eyes, but still something so innocent.

Water is ever-present in Big Girls, punctuating both the landscape and the seemingly endless summer days. In Sid’s loneliest moments, she runs a bath, perhaps taking comfort in being wholly blanketed by something. The film’s ending comes somewhat abruptly after Sid gets her period on the last day of the holidays. She strips off the bloody underwear and hugs herself tight, submerged under the bathwater. From Schneideman’s interest in subconscious desires, we might read this final fetal image as an amorphous attempt to retreat into the primordial waters of the womb. From here, perhaps, Sid is ready to be reborn.

Big Girls Don’t Cry screens in Melbourne cinemas on Wednesday 19, Friday 21, Saturday 22 and Sunday 23 August and at Village Cinemas Geelong on Saturday 22 August as part of the MIFF 2026 program.

The above has been written as part of MIFF’s Critics Campus program. The opinion expressed is the author’s and does not necessarily reflect that of the festival.