"Pressure starts to occur. There's a lot of influence coming from the internet and TV. I just felt this massive disparity shift as all my friends were developing and getting boyfriends and being sexualised, and I remember just being like, 'F***, like, I am being left behind here.'"
"There's a murky territory between intimacy being something platonic or a symbol of familial affection, and it suddenly being expected of you by your peers in strange new ways. How do you survive that inexorably traumatic time between childhood and adolescence, when those peers appear to know who they are, while everything you thought you knew about yourself has crumbled?"
Filmmaker Paloma Schneideman's debut feature Big Girls Don't Cry examines the liminal space between childhood innocence and adolescent expectations. The film follows 14-year-old Sid during a transformative summer in rural New Zealand as she experiences her first intense crush on her sister's friend Freya while grappling with peer pressure and societal expectations around sexuality and maturation. Schneideman draws from her own experiences growing up, when friendships became strained as peers developed and became sexualized, creating pressure to abandon childhood activities and conform to adult expectations. The film explores how young people navigate the confusing territory between platonic intimacy and romantic expectations, questioning how to survive this period when peers seem confident while one's own identity feels uncertain.
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