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Growing Up

Growing Up

A bittersweet collection of documentaries and a few fiction films on a wide range of childhoods and childhood experiences around the world, from the adventures and idylls of growing up, to coping with personal challenges, and facing terrible tragedies.

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Growing Up
  • Who By Fire

    Directed by Philippe Lesage • Drama • With Arieh Worthalter, Paul Ahmarani, Noah Parker, Aurélia Arandi-Longpré • 2024 • 155 minutes

    A getaway at a secluded log cabin in the forest becomes the site of escalating, multigenerational tensions and anxieties in this disquieting, impeccably mounted co...

  • Block Pass

    Directed by Antoine Chevrollier • Drama • With Sayyid El Alami, Amaury Foucher • 2025 • 103 minutes

    Block Pass is a queer motocross coming-of-age drama—sensitive, deeply felt, and quietly profound—that establishes Antoine Chevrollier as a filmmaker to watch.

    Reminiscent of Rebel Without a Cause...

  • Drunk on Too Much Life

    Directed by Michelle Melles • Documentary • 2021 • 77 minutes

    Drunk on Too Much Life is an intimate and powerful documentary following the filmmaker's 21-year-old daughter’s mind-opening journey from locked-down psych wards and diagnostic labels towards expansive worlds of creativity, connection...

  • Jane Campion: A Girl's Own Story

    Directed by Jane Campion • Drama • 1984 • 27 minutes

    Beatlemania, the sixties and growing up. Some stories about girlhood: where family is strange, adulthood lonely, and innocence perverse.

    "A beautifully photographed, sharply drawn drama...A lovely debut which will be compared to Jane Campion'...

  • North Putnam

    Directed by Joel Fendelman • Documentary • 2024 • 90 minutes

    Crafted with empathy, a hyper-real reporting lens and skillfully lush cinematography, North Putnam depicts a year in the life of a rural Indiana school district and the community it serves. Multiple storylines intersect, culminating in...

  • The Year We Thought About Love

    Directed by Ellen Brodsky • Documentary • 2015 • 68 minutes

    The Year We Thought About Love goes behind the scenes of the oldest queer youth theater in America. In a twist on the common image of LGBTQ youth as victims, the film reveals the troupe members as artists and activists, celebrating the ...

  • Silvio Rodriguez: My First Calling

    Directed by Catherine Murphy • Documentary • With Silvio Rodriquez • 2022 • 25 minutes

    My First Calling explores the little-known story of global music giant Silvio Rodriguez, who intimately recounts coming of age on the youth brigades of the 1961 Cuban Literacy Campaign, where at only 14-years ...

  • Toomelah (Ivan Sen)

    Directed by Ivan Sen • Drama • With Daniel Connors, Michael Connors, Christopher Edwards • 2011 • 101 minutes

    In a remote Aboriginal community, 10 year old Daniel yearns to be a gangster, like the male role models in his life. Skipping school, getting into fights and running drugs for Linden, wh...

  • Beneath Clouds (Ivan Sen)

    Directed by Ivan Sen • Drama • With Dannielle Hall, Damian Pitt, Jenna Lee Connors • 2011 • 90 minutes

    Lena is a fair-skinned teenage girl with a dark skinned mother in an isolated Australian town. She rejects the Indigenous family that surrounds her, and longs for the love of her Irish father. ...

  • The Dish & the Spoon (Allison Bagnall, w/ Greta Gerwig)

    Directed by Alison Bagnall • Drama • With Greta Gerwig, Olly Alexander • 2011 • 92 minutes

    This quirky romantic comedy follows Rose (Greta Gerwig), whose life changes after discovering her husband’s affair. Devastated and reeling, she soon crosses paths with a marooned British teenager (Olly Ale...

  • The Rink

    Directed by Sarah Ema Friedland • Documentary • With Gralen Stephon Vereen, Mickey "Bonesaw" Taylor,the Garden State Roller Derby Girls • 2014 • 53 minutes

    Branch Brook Park Roller Rink in Newark, New Jersey is one of the few remaining urban rinks of its kind. This concrete structure is nestled ...

  • Deej

    Directed by Robert Rooy • Documentary • With DJ Savarese • 2017 • 73 minutes

    Abandoned by his birth parents and presumed incompetent, DJ Savarese (“Deej”) found not only a loving family but also a life in words, which he types on a text-to-voice synthesizer. As he makes his way through high scho...

  • Inbetween Girl

    Directed by Mei Makino • Drama • With Emma Galbraith, William Magnuson • 2021 • 90 minutes

    Teen artist Angie Chen does NOT like Liam--she just likes getting rides home from him after soccer practice. Okay, so he has great eyebrows, but he's with Sheryl, the Instagram princess of their Episcopali...

  • Winnie Wright, Age 11

    Directed by Suzanne Davenport • Documentary • 1974 • 26 minutes

    Winnie, the daughter of a steel worker and a teacher lives in Gage Park, a Chicago neighborhood that is changing from white to black. Her family struggles with racism, inflation and a threatened strike, as Winnie learns what it mean...

  • Sisterhood

    Directed by Nora El Hourch • Drama • With Leah Aubert, Médina Diarra, Salma Takaline • 2024 • 101 minutes

    Despite their different social backgrounds, Amina, Djeneba, and Zineb have been friends for as long as they can remember. When Zineb experiences harassment from her brother’s best friend, Am...

  • Roads of Lava

    Directed by Gretel Marin • Documentary • 2024 • 28 minutes

    Afibola—a Black, queer, feminist activist and poet—lives with her eight-year-old son Olorun in downtown Havana, Cuba. Moving between the safety of their modest home and the uncertainty of the streets outside, Afibolo reflects on the comp...

  • Youth (Spring)

    Directed by Wang Bing • Documentary • 2023 • 215 minutes

    The town of Zhili, about 95 miles from Shanghai, is a center for the children’s garment industry. Workers in their teens and early twenties come from surrounding provinces to live in sparse, trash-strewn concrete dorms in the same building...

  • Youth (Hard Times)

    Directed by Wang Bing • Documentary • 2024 • 226 minutes

    YOUTH (HARD TIMES) is the second installment in Chinese director Wang Bing’s monumental series chronicling the lives of migrant garment workers — some as young as 15 — in the Zhili district of Huzhou City. Wang immerses himself in the live...

  • The Dilemma of Desire

    Directed by Maria Finitzo • Documentary • 2020 • 118 minutes

    THE DILEMMA OF DESIRE is a provocative new film helping to normalize dialogue about female sexuality. The film follows diverse, intergenerational stories of women who are shattering lies about female sexual desire, bodies and power. Ar...

  • Now We Live on Clifton

    Directed by Jerry Blumenthal, Alphonse Blumenthal, Susan Delson, Sharon Karp, Peter Kuttner, Gordon Quinn, Richa • Documentary • 1974 • 26 minutes

    Now We Live on Clifton follows 10 year old Pam Taylor and her 12 year old brother Scott around their multiracial West Lincoln Park neighborhood. The ...

  • Polish Prayers

    Directed by Hanka Nobis • Documentary • 2022 • 82 minutes

    It is the women, the tender, difficult, exciting relationships with them, through which Antek learns to really be a man. The film follows him from when he has all the answers to the many questions any young man needs to answer for himself...

  • Spare Keys

    Directed by Jeanne Aslan and Paul Saintillan • Drama • With Céleste Brunnquell, Quentin Dolmaire • 2023 • 108 minutes

    In Nancy, situated in eastern France, 15-year-old Sophie (Céleste Brunnquell) yearns to break free from her dysfunctional family. After one argument too many, she seizes an oppor...

  • Marguerite's Theorem

    Directed by Anna Novion • Drama • With Ella Rumpf, Jean-Pierre Darroussin, Clotilde Courau • 2023 • 115 minutes

    The trajectory of Marguerite’s future, a brilliant mathematics PhD at France's prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure, seems perfectly planned out. As the only woman in her class in the ...

  • Stop-Zemlia

    Directed by Kateryna Gornostai • Drama • 2021 • 122 minutes

    Hanging out with friends, smoking too much, spinning bottles and kissing, making mistakes, playing, refusing to accept, dreaming with open eyes – life as a teenager can be overwhelmingly beautiful and difficult at the same time. Introve...