American Minor

A meditation on the popular image of the American teen girl.

Through carefully created, lingering scenes, the film focuses on the external environment and internal state of a fourteen-year-old, upper-middle-class blonde girl whose world is defined through products, objects, and perpetual consumption. The film observes a single, protracted morning in the life of a picture-perfect American youth lost in the dehumanizing space that wealth, isolation, and fear can provide. By watching this American teen perform basic acts, from eating cereal, to watching television, to combing her hair, the film aims to reveal the complicated relationship between personal pleasure and politics, youth and sexuality, and class and suppression. American Minor premiered in Nine Lives at the Hammer Museum in 2009, curated by Ali Subotnick, and then went on to be featured at the Sundance Film Festival and Director’s Fortnight in Cannes, both 2009.