Cookie Queens Follows Four Girl Scouts with Thin Mints and Thick Skins

Sundance Film Review: Cookie Queens
Director: Alysa Nahmias
Cookie Queens Production
Premiere: 01.25.2026

Awards season can be challenging as a film critic, and for me, one of the most taxing aspects is binging documentaries about gun violence, war and other heavy or disturbing subject matter. Many are great films, but they go better with antidepressants than with popcorn. Cookie Queens, much like the very products that its subjects are selling, may not be particularly filling, but it’s a sweet treat.

Every winter, card tables are set up outside stores, covered with stacks of colorful cookie boxes, and young girls practice their sales pitches on passing strangers. Among those girls are Ara, Olive, Nikki and Shannon Elizabeth — four Girl Scouts ranging in age from 5 to 12 — who have all set a goal to sell a certain number of cookies by the deadline. Through determination, grit and more than a little bit of awareness that cuteness sells, they see it through and bring Do-si-dos, Thin Mints and Adventurefuls to the masses. This often taxing process comes during a crucial and formative period of childhood, when ideas about confidence, rivalry and self-worth are just beginning to take shape. Selling cookies becomes these girls’ first real lesson in setting goals, persuading others and pushing through setbacks. Alongside the victories come long days, fatigue, frustration and pressure coming at them from their peers, from the Girl Scouts of America, from parents and from themselves.  

Director Alysa Nahmias (Unfinished Spaces) is a skilled hand behind the camera, and Cookie Queens is a fast-moving and very entertaining look at an 800-million-dollar business model.  One of the girls, 12-year-old Olive, makes the point that it’s “technically child labor,” though she adds that it is voluntary. Olive is something of a celebrity, holding a record by selling 8,745 boxes in a single season, and we follow her story closely, as she approaches what she tentatively plans to be her last year of intense sales. The need to meet or beat her goals is such a driving force in Olive’s life that she struggles with finding time to be a kid. The question of whether this obsessive drive for perfection is coming from Olive or from her mother, Carrie, is addressed more than once in the film — but never definitively answered. 

The one-on-one discussions between mother and daughter about this pressure are quite compelling, but they don’t feel completely genuine. There’s a clear awareness that private moments and vulnerability are playing out in front of a camera, and it’s so apparent that I often found myself questioning what we weren’t seeing. In contrast, 5-year-old Ara, who can only have a small taste of the cookies herself due to Type-1 diabetes, is incredibly precocious but seems incapable of being anything but her authentic self. Shannon Elizabeth (the Girl Scout, not the popular actress of the early 2000s who played Nadia in American Pie) is an 8-year-old Latinx and Native American girl from El Paso, Texas. She is determined to attend summer camp, which she can go to for free if she and her financially strapped parents meet the lofty sales goal they’ve set for themselves. The stress the family is facing is palpable, and whether or not they can do it becomes a real nail-biter. Meanwhile, Nikki, a 9-year-old from Chino, California, is the only member of her troop. She dreams of being like her sisters, 14-year-old Nala and 16-year-old Nyah, both record holders, high school cheerleaders and members of a troop for teens. 

The audience grows to care about each of these girls quite a bit, both in terms of seeing them reach their goals and in terms of their uncertain futures. Cookie Queens flirts with the question of whether this single-minded pursuit is an entirely healthy one, though it’s ultimately more interested in the individuals than the big picture, letting the subjects be the story. The annual question that many of us ask ourselves as we fork over our cash — “What exactly do Girl Scouts do besides make hundreds of millions for the organization?” — is barely touched on, and I found this to be a bit frustrating. On the whole, I was too invested in the girls and their efforts to care too much about the stories that weren’t being told, but it left me with a lot of lingering questions. 

Cookie Queens is as irresistible as one more Samoa (or Carmel de-Lite, as it’s now known), and it’s a very solid feel-good movie that offers a nice alternative to true crime and political documentation. It’s likely to be a big crowd pleaser, and it achieves most of its goals quite splendidly. —Patrick Gibbs

Read more of SLUG’s coverage of the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.