Cookie Queens

(USA, 91 min.)

Dir. Alysa Nahmias

Prod. Michael Dweck, Gregory Kershaw, Alysa Nahmias, Jennifer Sims

Programme: Family Matinee

Leave it to the producer of Wildcat and Unrest, and the guys behind the stunning observational films Gaucho Gaucho and The Truffle Hunters, to craft such a deliciously effective film about the business of Girl Scout cookies. Superficially, Cookie Queens follows the normal “competition doc” route, pitting differing competitors against each other as they struggle to reach a certain achievement. But thanks to some crafty filmmaking and stellar instincts to find key characters to follow, we’re treated to much more than some sugary snack.

The annual sales drive of Girl Scout cookies is the central funding scheme for this storied organization, resulting in over $800 million dollars of revenue annually. In the U.S., some 200,000 young girls are set out to achieve their stated goals, trafficking the likes of Thin Mints, Lemonades, Trefoils and Do-So-Dos to members of the community. Standing in the cold outside grocery stores, wandering the aisles of flea markets, or using the tools of social media, e-commerce, and even broadcast television to hawk their wares, the cookie drive is, on the one hand, an exercise in developing entrepreneurial skills, and on the other hand, an explicit example of child labour exploitation.

What elevates Cookie Queens are the perspectives of four kids from various backgrounds who thrive and struggle with these cookie conundrums. The film isn’t some shiny celebration, nor is it a dour excoriation of the practice. Instead, it’s a terrifically nuanced look at this formative experience for these young people, belying any preconceived expectations of what’s to transpire as they set out on their sales goals, while still allowing central questions and concerns to be raised throughout.

We meet Olive, a legendary salesperson who, at the age of twelve, is already a veteran in the game. A record holder for her region, we see as she creates a slightly modest goal of 5,000 boxes sold (still almost double the other members of her troupe), and sets about making things happen. Assisted by her parents, she has the tenacity and slightly manic approach of a young Tracy Flick from Alexander Payne’s comedy Election, and one could easily see this mode of entrepreneurial intensity mocked in other circumstances.

Yet Olive is well aware of the pressures to achieve, both from within and without, with the responsibilities buttressed by the drive to upsell to her prospective clients. The blasé way she receives constant compliments of being such a “good little sales lady” shows how much of the work has become rote. At the same time, there’s a clear drive to add another record to her list of achievements.

We’re introduced to Nikki as she watches her older sisters Nyah and Nala as they rehearse for their latest TikTok dance video. She peeks around the corner but isn’t invited to participate in the fun. The elder siblings are all former champion sellers in Chino, California, and Nikki is in a position to make a mark of her own. The goal for them is to sell enough cookies to warrant a trip to Europe, and it’ll take many trips in the family’s Cadillac SUV to be selling rain or shine to make this dream a reality.

We then travel to El Paso, Texas to meet Shannon Elizabeth, an eight-year-old whose dream is simply to attend a summer camp. Her parents are of lesser means than the others, but together as family, they take a real financial risk in order to foster their daughter’s dream. Part of the mechanism of these sales is that parents must pre-buy the inventory, meaning that success or failure to achieve sales goals can have real lasting consequences on those without the income to regularly gamble on such ventures.

Finally, there’s Ara, a precocious five-year-old with the modest goal of 50 boxes sold. Traipsing on the California beaches with her red wagon in tow, she exudes warmth and joy while trying to share sweets with strangers. A small device to regulate her insulin levels is attached to her arm, making the selling of sugary snacks a slightly ironic practice. Here too the film deftly injects a small amount of critique in showing how inclusion only goes so far within the massive process of the cookie game.

Executive produced by Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, the film has the markings of something major, primed to be embraced by the millions who have either sold these cookies themselves, or simply have partaken of the treats on an annual basis with attention gained from the royal imprimatur.  Yet Nahmias’ deft storytelling sets the film apart from any celebrity endorsement, beautifully navigating the various complexities without ever losing its sweet appeal.

Cookie Queens is one of those terrific works of non-fiction that explores a microcosm only to uncover far broader social and political factors that emerge from what otherwise would appear to be a minor cultural event. Emotionally rich, terrifically paced and handsomely framed, this is an exceptional work that’s greater than its ingredients, sandwiching politics, commerce, and the joys of childhood all into one package.

Cookie Queens premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.

The post Cookie Queens Review: This Doc Never Crumbles appeared first on POV Magazine.

From a doc on a once-in-a-lifetime cocktail party to a gritty 1970s-throwback survivalist thriller — the highlights of the final ‘dance at the film festival’s longtime home base

From a doc on a once-in-a-lifetime cocktail party to a gritty 1970s-throwback survivalist thriller — the highlights of the final ‘dance at the film festival’s longtime home base

If you film anyone for long enough, you’ll have a story to tell. If nothing else, you’ll have a biographical narrative. If you film a child as they grow, you’ll have an easy coming-of-age documentary (or drama, in the case of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood). That doesn’t mean it will be a great story or a great film, and some of that might depend on the subject chosen and the choices they make, but you’ll likely have the resources needed. A great editor might find something brilliant to carve out of the footage shot willy-nilly, but a great director would be keen enough to capture material that best lends itself to such cinematic sculpture.

The title One in a Million may as well refer to its existence as a documentary that came together so well because of both directorial and editorial acumen. Credit may also go to the decisions of its characters and, ultimately, world events, but that could be like acknowledging the marble and model as much as the artist. The film, directed by Itab Azzam and Jack Macinnes, and edited by Iain Pettifer and Alec Rossiter, was shot over a decade and follows one family of Syrian refugees as they migrate to Germany and adjust in various ways. The main character is the eldest daughter, Isra’a, who is 11 at the beginning of this story. But her parents’ individual journeys and how their lives and minds change over time are often even more interesting than her tale of growing up and coming into her cultural identity before eventually returning to a free Aleppo.

A lot of films covering extensive periods of time tend to play catch-up — here’s another year, and what has happened since the last visit from the filmmakers. They depend more on interviews, providing relayed updates rather than documenting the lives as they’re happening. One in a Million does depend on updates here and there, but it shows at least as much as it tells, if not more so. Things we see or hear early in the documentary lead to developments that happen years later, as if they’re scripted foreshadowing. I assume those moments were retroactively selected from (likely hours of) footage that had been shot with a sharp awareness of what Isra’a and her family were going through and how they were feeling. Maybe some connections were fortuitous, but the structuring of the film is too tight to have been all happy accidents.

One in a Million captures a decade in the lives of one particular family, but it’s a wide snapshot of a particular period, from the migrant crisis to the rise of right-wing anti-immigration campaigns in Europe (and protests against them) to the fall of the Assad regime. It begins with the plight of refugees crossing the Mediterranean that we saw in several documentaries 10 years ago, such as Gianfranco Rosi’s feature Fire at Sea and the short film 4.1 Miles, both of which were nominated for an Oscar in the same year. Much of this family’s story is also timeless, in the film’s portrait of a people on the move: the universal tale of immigrants, carrying forth customs (some good, some bad) while also becoming acclimated to assimilation (some good, some bad). We see both the usual and specific differences in the hopes and outcomes for a husband and a wife, and for older and younger generations, in their new world.

There are plenty of documentaries filmed for a decade or more that only come together with their point at the end, a la the good but often dull 2013 feature American Promise (which was too uniformly compared to Boyhood). Occasionally, we get one that is poignantly observed and conveyed throughout, as is the case with One in a Million. It’s fitting that the last documentary of this kind to resonate so much as both a timely and timeless coming-of-age story within a specific era debuted almost a decade ago: Quest (which I reluctantly also compared to Boyhood), an underrated 2017 film that is to life during the Obama presidency as this film is to life during the migrant crisis. They’re nothing alike except in their documentary artistry and substance. I wish One in a Million weren’t such a rarity, but it’d probably stand out regardless.

If you film anyone for long enough, you’ll have a story to tell. If nothing else, you’ll have a biographical narrative. If you film a child as they grow, you’ll have an easy coming-of-age documentary (or drama, in the case of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood). That doesn’t mean it will be a great story or a great film, and some of that might depend on the subject chosen and the choices they make, but you’ll likely have the resources needed. A great editor might find something brilliant to carve out of the footage shot willy-nilly, but a great director would be keen enough to capture material that best lends itself to such cinematic sculpture.

The title One in a Million may as well refer to its existence as a documentary that came together so well because of both directorial and editorial acumen. Credit may also go to the decisions of its characters and, ultimately, world events, but that could be like acknowledging the marble and model as much as the artist. The film, directed by Itab Azzam and Jack Macinnes, and edited by Iain Pettifer and Alec Rossiter, was shot over a decade and follows one family of Syrian refugees as they migrate to Germany and adjust in various ways. The main character is the eldest daughter, Isra’a, who is 11 at the beginning of this story. But her parents’ individual journeys and how their lives and minds change over time are often even more interesting than her tale of growing up and coming into her cultural identity before eventually returning to a free Aleppo.

A lot of films covering extensive periods of time tend to play catch-up — here’s another year, and what has happened since the last visit from the filmmakers. They depend more on interviews, providing relayed updates rather than documenting the lives as they’re happening. One in a Million does depend on updates here and there, but it shows at least as much as it tells, if not more so. Things we see or hear early in the documentary lead to developments that happen years later, as if they’re scripted foreshadowing. I assume those moments were retroactively selected from (likely hours of) footage that had been shot with a sharp awareness of what Isra’a and her family were going through and how they were feeling. Maybe some connections were fortuitous, but the structuring of the film is too tight to have been all happy accidents.

One in a Million captures a decade in the lives of one particular family, but it’s a wide snapshot of a particular period, from the migrant crisis to the rise of right-wing anti-immigration campaigns in Europe (and protests against them) to the fall of the Assad regime. It begins with the plight of refugees crossing the Mediterranean that we saw in several documentaries 10 years ago, such as Gianfranco Rosi’s feature Fire at Sea and the short film 4.1 Miles, both of which were nominated for an Oscar in the same year. Much of this family’s story is also timeless, in the film’s portrait of a people on the move: the universal tale of immigrants, carrying forth customs (some good, some bad) while also becoming acclimated to assimilation (some good, some bad). We see both the usual and specific differences in the hopes and outcomes for a husband and a wife, and for older and younger generations, in their new world.

There are plenty of documentaries filmed for a decade or more that only come together with their point at the end, a la the good but often dull 2013 feature American Promise (which was too uniformly compared to Boyhood). Occasionally, we get one that is poignantly observed and conveyed throughout, as is the case with One in a Million. It’s fitting that the last documentary of this kind to resonate so much as both a timely and timeless coming-of-age story within a specific era debuted almost a decade ago: Quest (which I reluctantly also compared to Boyhood), an underrated 2017 film that is to life during the Obama presidency as this film is to life during the migrant crisis. They’re nothing alike except in their documentary artistry and substance. I wish One in a Million weren’t such a rarity, but it’d probably stand out regardless.

Greetings from the month of “Sundance” in the season of “Awards,”

What a massive loss. So few actors could pull off a character as funny, and as lovable, as Moira Rose. I will miss her so much.

It’s always struck me as unfair that Sundance/Awards happens during Winter (horrible) and Holidays (complicated). But my coping strategy during this fraught season of peak social comparison and peak waiting for gatekeeper validation has always been to put my head down, work harder, and work more.

Sundance/Awards is just one of the seasons. It might be the best or the worst season for you this year. Either way, nearly all of this stuff will be forgotten (and sooner than we think). But the work lives on forever. The work is what will matter in the end.

Me, Gabriel and Nick are in our final post-production sessions on Wild Inside (@flacodocumentary). Yesterday we spent a glorious day in a dark room with our genius colorist Seth Ricart, who is doing his wizardry (this time in something called “HDR” which I am told is very exciting)! After years of watching offline media, you get used to what I call “the gray.” So, seeing everything in full resolution with the real color… it’s just like magic. I always fall in love with the film all over again! And I start to dream about sharing it with audiences. Real people! Who I know will love it!!

We spent a LOT of time with Seth making sure Flaco’s eyes are always the right shade of orange, as in this subway mosaic by the artist Fred Tomaselli.

The work lives on forever, and I am very focused these days on making sure the work actually reaches the people who will love it. The audience! But how do I find these people?

I have a little bit of a fanbase, which is somewhat unusual for a documentarian. (Ask people on the street to name 10 doc filmmakers and see how far they get. As far as I can tell, most people think “Netflix” or “HBO” is the director, if they ever even consider that a documentary has a director!)

It’s especially unusual because I am not working in one, established genre; my body of work is heterogeneous. I’ve always been aware that some people would be down for a Nixon movie, and others would be down for a Kenny movie… and that a much smaller number of people are down for a Penny Lane movie specifically. But it is this last category of person I am most interested in finding, because the Nixon people and the Kenny people are relatively easy to find with some basic marketing, but the people I want to find most of all are the Penny Lane people. These are my long-haul people!

I find it meaningful that whoever put this copy together for the HBOMax app thought it would be good to list the name of the director in the capsule text. It’s really not that common!

One of my goals this year is to put a lot more effort into finding more Penny Lane people. I want to learn more about marketing. I want to build my fanbase. I want more than anything for my work to reach the people who will love it!!! This post is about how I learned to stop worrying and embrace my inner content creator. Because I believe this is the best thing I can do for my art.

I’m aware that many people find this entire concept cringe, or worse than cringe. It sounds crass! It sounds commercial! But it’s the exact opposite of that.

I need to spend time learning about marketing and cultivating an audience for my work not because the work I make is crassly commercial, but because the work I make is not crassly commercial. If my work was crassly commercial, I wouldn’t need to work nearly as hard at developing an audience for it.

Releasing a film takes a long time, and in some ways it never ends. Look at the Apple charts for documentary today. What do you notice?

Some observations:

1) The Corey Feldman documentary has been sitting at #1 for many weeks. It is incredible. It’s well-crafted, funny, incisive, heartbreaking. It’s so good; go watch it! As far as I can tell, this film released without any film festivals, and no streamers or industry support of any kind.

2) Some of these films are old, some of them are more than a decade old. Wow! The work lives on. The work is evergreen and can always find new audiences!!

3) In trying to figure out why those particular older films (and some of the newer ones, too) shot to the top of the charts, I determined that it’s probably not a coincidence that all of them were recently recommended by @thatdocumentarygirl, who the Sundance/Awards people have probably never heard of and/or are mad about, but whose impact on sales is comparable to that of Oprah’s book club for novelists.1

Call me a populist if you wish, but somehow at the end of the day, actual people being willing to part with their dollars and time to see my films might be the success metric I care about the most. Again: this is especially true for me because I am not pandering to a guaranteed audience.

As much as I long for and jealously covet the validation of Sundance/Awards: ain’t none of that paying my bills. Plus: even in the best of times (and we are not in those), I can’t necessarily count on The Industry to finance my work either. In the long run, I need audiences for that. This post is about longevity.

2026: the year I stopped being embarrassed about being a content creator

The other day I told a friend I wasn’t free next Tuesday night because I’m “taking a night class.” I knew he thought I meant, “I’m finally reading Ulysses” or something like that. I didn’t want to tell him the shameful truth: it’s a course on content creation.

I’m writing this post to banish that last little part of shame I felt.

The “night class” I am taking is ’s HYPE HOUSE. It’s actually a class for writers, but I’ve found all the lessons applicable to my career as well. Leigh gave me permission to share this slide from the first day of class, which I am sharing because it sums up her approach so well:

I have found that last point, #5, to be especially true. I feel incredibly empowered by this work. It’s fun! I’m good at it! I’m learning a lot, and seeing real progress each week. I’ve barely gotten started in this new adventure — I’ve got 4 more weeks of HYPE HOUSE to go! — but I haven’t felt so optimistic in quite some time.

Even before I was in Leigh’s course, I was applying myself to this goal. Starting this Substack in November in the wake of my Sundance rejection was part of it, although I imagine my audience for this newsletter to be more within “the documentary community” and not as much about discovering new audiences for my films. (If your entire audience is inside “the documentary community,” that might be good enough for Sundance/Awards, but not much else.)

For finding new viewers, I’ve been focused on Instagram. I’ve been mostly making content related to Happy and You Know It, since that’s just out on HBO, and it’s incredibly rewarding to see people — not my friends! not the doc community!! actual potential viewers!!! — engaging with it so passionately. I feel pretty confident I’ve driven some people to the film, but I wish I knew more directly that was true. My follower count also went up by about 600 since November. Not bad for someone who literally didn’t know what a “Reel” was 2 months ago.

I’ve also been working on being more intentional with how I present myself on the internet. For example, one of my content creation assignments was to “introduce myself.” I made this graphic for my Instagram and I pinned it to the top:

Now, if someone comes to my Instagram, instead of randomly seeing some pictures of my cat (which are still on there… just not at the very top) they at least know who they’re dealing with.

Leigh has helped me to feel not shame about this pursuit, but joy. She says, “making content is how we make friends.”

Hello, friends! I am so happy you are here.

Greetings from the month of “Sundance” in the season of “Awards,”

What a massive loss. So few actors could pull off a character as funny, and as lovable, as Moira Rose. I will miss her so much.

It’s always struck me as unfair that Sundance/Awards happens during Winter (horrible) and Holidays (complicated). But my coping strategy during this fraught season of peak social comparison and peak waiting for gatekeeper validation has always been to put my head down, work harder, and work more.

Sundance/Awards is just one of the seasons. It might be the best or the worst season for you this year. Either way, nearly all of this stuff will be forgotten (and sooner than we think). But the work lives on forever. The work is what will matter in the end.

Me, Gabriel and Nick are in our final post-production sessions on Wild Inside (@flacodocumentary). Yesterday we spent a glorious day in a dark room with our genius colorist Seth Ricart, who is doing his wizardry (this time in something called “HDR” which I am told is very exciting)! After years of watching offline media, you get used to what I call “the gray.” So, seeing everything in full resolution with the real color… it’s just like magic. I always fall in love with the film all over again! And I start to dream about sharing it with audiences. Real people! Who I know will love it!!

We spent a LOT of time with Seth making sure Flaco’s eyes are always the right shade of orange, as in this subway mosaic by the artist Fred Tomaselli.

The work lives on forever, and I am very focused these days on making sure the work actually reaches the people who will love it. The audience! But how do I find these people?

I have a little bit of a fanbase, which is somewhat unusual for a documentarian. (Ask people on the street to name 10 doc filmmakers and see how far they get. As far as I can tell, most people think “Netflix” or “HBO” is the director, if they ever even consider that a documentary has a director!)

It’s especially unusual because I am not working in one, established genre; my body of work is heterogeneous. I’ve always been aware that some people would be down for a Nixon movie, and others would be down for a Kenny movie… and that a much smaller number of people are down for a Penny Lane movie specifically. But it is this last category of person I am most interested in finding, because the Nixon people and the Kenny people are relatively easy to find with some basic marketing, but the people I want to find most of all are the Penny Lane people. These are my long-haul people!

I find it meaningful that whoever put this copy together for the HBOMax app thought it would be good to list the name of the director in the capsule text. It’s really not that common!

One of my goals this year is to put a lot more effort into finding more Penny Lane people. I want to learn more about marketing. I want to build my fanbase. I want more than anything for my work to reach the people who will love it!!! This post is about how I learned to stop worrying and embrace my inner content creator. Because I believe this is the best thing I can do for my art.

I’m aware that many people find this entire concept cringe, or worse than cringe. It sounds crass! It sounds commercial! But it’s the exact opposite of that.

I need to spend time learning about marketing and cultivating an audience for my work not because the work I make is crassly commercial, but because the work I make is not crassly commercial. If my work was crassly commercial, I wouldn’t need to work nearly as hard at developing an audience for it.

Releasing a film takes a long time, and in some ways it never ends. Look at the Apple charts for documentary today. What do you notice?

Some observations:

1) The Corey Feldman documentary has been sitting at #1 for many weeks. It is incredible. It’s well-crafted, funny, incisive, heartbreaking. It’s so good; go watch it! As far as I can tell, this film released without any film festivals, and no streamers or industry support of any kind.

2) Some of these films are old, some of them are more than a decade old. Wow! The work lives on. The work is evergreen and can always find new audiences!!

3) In trying to figure out why those particular older films (and some of the newer ones, too) shot to the top of the charts, I determined that it’s probably not a coincidence that all of them were recently recommended by @thatdocumentarygirl, who the Sundance/Awards people have probably never heard of and/or are mad about, but whose impact on sales is comparable to that of Oprah’s book club for novelists.1

Call me a populist if you wish, but somehow at the end of the day, actual people being willing to part with their dollars and time to see my films might be the success metric I care about the most. Again: this is especially true for me because I am not pandering to a guaranteed audience.

As much as I long for and jealously covet the validation of Sundance/Awards: ain’t none of that paying my bills. Plus: even in the best of times (and we are not in those), I can’t necessarily count on The Industry to finance my work either. In the long run, I need audiences for that. This post is about longevity.

2026: the year I stopped being embarrassed about being a content creator

The other day I told a friend I wasn’t free next Tuesday night because I’m “taking a night class.” I knew he thought I meant, “I’m finally reading Ulysses” or something like that. I didn’t want to tell him the shameful truth: it’s a course on content creation.

I’m writing this post to banish that last little part of shame I felt.

The “night class” I am taking is ’s HYPE HOUSE. It’s actually a class for writers, but I’ve found all the lessons applicable to my career as well. Leigh gave me permission to share this slide from the first day of class, which I am sharing because it sums up her approach so well:

I have found that last point, #5, to be especially true. I feel incredibly empowered by this work. It’s fun! I’m good at it! I’m learning a lot, and seeing real progress each week. I’ve barely gotten started in this new adventure — I’ve got 4 more weeks of HYPE HOUSE to go! — but I haven’t felt so optimistic in quite some time.

Even before I was in Leigh’s course, I was applying myself to this goal. Starting this Substack in November in the wake of my Sundance rejection was part of it, although I imagine my audience for this newsletter to be more within “the documentary community” and not as much about discovering new audiences for my films. (If your entire audience is inside “the documentary community,” that might be good enough for Sundance/Awards, but not much else.)

For finding new viewers, I’ve been focused on Instagram. I’ve been mostly making content related to Happy and You Know It, since that’s just out on HBO, and it’s incredibly rewarding to see people — not my friends! not the doc community!! actual potential viewers!!! — engaging with it so passionately. I feel pretty confident I’ve driven some people to the film, but I wish I knew more directly that was true. My follower count also went up by about 600 since November. Not bad for someone who literally didn’t know what a “Reel” was 2 months ago.

I’ve also been working on being more intentional with how I present myself on the internet. For example, one of my content creation assignments was to “introduce myself.” I made this graphic for my Instagram and I pinned it to the top:

Now, if someone comes to my Instagram, instead of randomly seeing some pictures of my cat (which are still on there… just not at the very top) they at least know who they’re dealing with.

Leigh has helped me to feel not shame about this pursuit, but joy. She says, “making content is how we make friends.”

Hello, friends! I am so happy you are here.

Bamford was joined by “Paralyzed by Hope: The Maria Bamford Story” co-directors Judd Apatow and Neil Berkeley in the IndieWire Studio, presented by Dropbox.

From bus-stop posters to a huge Culver City billboard, ads for the Amazon doc are being updated with Hitler mustaches, devil horns, and even excrement

From bus-stop posters to a huge Culver City billboard, ads for the Amazon doc are being updated with Hitler mustaches, devil horns, and even excrement