Big Girls Don’t Cry review – a New Zealand teenager finds herself in tender coming-of-age tale

Writer-director Paloma Schneideman’s wonderful film follows a 14-year-old in 2006 who pretends to be someone else in a chat room, with real-world consequences

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All coming-of-age films face the challenge of how to convey that intermediary period between childhood and adulthood, with all the confusion, awkwardness and self-searching that entails. Writer-director Paloma Schneideman’s drama Big Girls Don’t Cry meets that challenge, resulting in a tenderly drawn story about the slow process of a 14-year-old in rural New Zealand finding herself.

Schneideman’s film has a wonderfully unforced quality, unfolding in a deeply satisfying yet seemingly effortless way. It’s as if the cameras are simply recording events organically unfolding in front of them, which of course isn’t the case at all: a drama like this requires immense thought and preparation. (The film is the first to be produced under the auspices of the Jane Campion-led film-making course A Wave in the Ocean.)