Watch it with us: Netflix streaming
Girlhood is so outstanding I almost don’t know what to say about it. So let’s dive right in, shall we?
Marieme is sixteen and has a crappy home life with an older brother who beats her up recreationally and a largely absent mother. Faced with the prospect of vocational school or no school at all, she drops out and is immediately befriended by three female juvenile delinquents. They party and shoplift and brawl with other girl gangs, but they also form a close friendship and take care of one another. Marieme falls in love with a friend of her brother’s, and when her brother finds out she’s had sex, he beats her up and she runs away, bidding a tearful goodbye to her girlfriends and her younger sister. She starts selling drugs for a gangster named Abou, and he moves her into an apartment with a young prostitute in his employ. But Abou proves to be just as much a bully as Marieme’s brother, so she runs away from him as well. She has to find somewhere else to run to. Continue reading
