Give Me the Backstory: Get to Know Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss, the Filmmakers Behind Girls State

By Lucy Spicer

One of the most exciting things about the Sundance Film Festival is having a front-row seat for the bright future of independent filmmaking. While we can learn a lot about the filmmakers from the 2024 Sundance Film Festival through the art that these storytellers share with us, there's always more we can learn about them as people. This year, we decided to get to the bottom of those artistic wells with our ongoing series: Give Me the Backstory!

In January 2020, filmmaking team Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss took home the U.S. Documentary Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival for their film Boys State. The documentary follows a group of a thousand teenage boys who participate in the weeklong Texas Boys State program, during which they are divided into two political parties and work to build their own system of government. A film about the Girls State program seemed an obvious choice for a future project. Immediately after our documentary Boys State was released, we began to think about making our sibling' film, Girls State, recalls the pair. We were determined to find a group of young women and a program that could equal or surpass the surprises we found at Texas Boys State. This was a tall order. But then we found Missouri Girls State, a big, vibrant program with strong leadership and an extraordinary group of young women of diverse backgrounds and politics who allowed us to shadow them through the intense weeklong experience.

Four years later, Girls State made its debut in the Premieres section at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. And while the Girls State program functions as a counterpart to Boys State, the 2024 documentary also points out differences between the two as the Missouri events take place concurrently. But the sense of urgency and formative impact that pervades the exercise is both familiar and illuminating. The State programs offer such a dramatic and revealing space to explore how teenagers are coming of age politically in this era of increasing polarization, when democracy itself feels perilous, note the film's co-directors.

Read on to learn more about McBaine and Moss, including their favorite part of making Girls State and how the pair first teamed up to make documentaries. Girls State' is available to stream on Apple TV+ April 5.

LINK:	https://www.sundance.org/blogs/give-me-the-backstory-get-to-know-amand...
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