Alysa Nahmias On Being a Tagalong with Girls Scouts For Cookie Queens 

When Alysa Nahmias set out to make Cookie Queens, she wasn’t trying to chase a trend or tap into nostalgia. She was responding to a challenge posed at her own dinner table. After finishing a previous film focused on mass incarceration, Nahmias recalls her kids offering a note of blunt honesty. “One night at dinner, they said, ‘You know, Mom, it would be really cool if you would do a film that we would really wanna watch and tell our friends about,’” Nahmias says. “And that just stuck with me.” It became both a creative dare and a personal mission, one that ultimately led her into the surprisingly intense, emotionally rich world of Girl Scout cookie season.

“Although I wasn’t a Girl Scout, I know what it’s like to be ambitious as a girl and as a woman in this world.”

Cookie Queens centers on four young Girl Scouts — Ara, Olive, Nikki and Shannon Elizabeth — as they plunge into the whirlwind of the annual cookie sale, a short but intense stretch that fuels a massive multimillion-dollar enterprise. The documentary stays close to the girls and their families as they set targets, face off with rivals and wrestle with the pride, pressure and vulnerability that come with wanting to succeed so early in life. “Although I wasn’t a Girl Scout, I know what it’s like to be ambitious as a girl and as a woman in this world,” Nahmias says. 

She’s a documentary filmmaker known for intimate, character-driven nonfiction stories. Nahmias is the founder of Ajna Films and first gained major recognition with Unfinished Spaces (2011), which won an Independent Spirit Award. When a conversation with one of her  researchers turned to the subject of a particularly aggressive young cookie seller, it sparked Nahmias’s imagination. In cookie season, she saw a microcosm of modern girlhood: a place where confidence, imagination, pressure, play and performance all collide. “I was interested in creating a more nuanced and three-dimensional representation of girlhood, and what it means to come of age today,” Nahmias says.

Finding the right girls to anchor the film was less about sales numbers and more about emotional openness. “We didn’t really go after a particular girl,” Nahmias says. “We started more grassroots, putting out information on moms groups, Girl Scout groups, social media, community groups, schools, and we fielded a lot of people who were interested.” What she looked for instead was internal life. “I was interested not just in external sales goals and accomplishments, but also the girls’ ability to self-reflect, the way they would make choices, their incredible imaginations and their ability to both play and take things seriously,” Nahmias explains.

“I was interested in creating a more nuanced and three-dimensional representation of girlhood, and what it means to come of age today.”

Their families mattered, too — backgrounds that would bring texture, contrast and complexity to the film’s world. That balance is especially visible in five-year-old Ara, one of the documentary’s most quietly arresting presences. “Often girls are portrayed as very sweet and innocent, or like they grow up too fast and are very adult, “ Nahmias says. “But I wanted to show that these girls are both.” Ara can talk strategy and money one moment and then, the next, still eat from toddler plates and play with her elephant. “That’s much truer to the experience of girls,” Nahmias says, “especially in those tween years, when sometimes you feel like a little girl and sometimes you want to be a big girl.” For Nahmias, Ara’s maturity isn’t a loss of childhood but a reflection of reality. “They’re not just practicing to participate in the economy,” Nahmias notes. “They are participating in it.”

Of course, documentary truth is always shaped by presence, and Nahmias is frank about the camera’s role in what we see. “There is an awareness — you’re not unaware that the camera is there,” Nahmias says. Filming over weeks and months, the crew became a familiar part of each household’s rhythm, present for the highs and the crashes of the season. “We had really been through with them to a large extent,” Nahmias says, and that closeness is what allows moments to feel lived-in rather than staged. She resists the idea that cameras inhibit honesty. “On the flip side of people feeling like they’re not gonna say everything with the camera there, there’s also sometimes a way in which they might feel more inclined to share something,” Nahmias says. For her, the goal isn’t invisibility but resonance. “What we see is something that allows others to feel and project their own experience onto what’s happening on screen,” she says. “That’s really magic for me — when people bring their own experiences and emotions and questions.”

That openness is what gives Cookie Queens its unexpected emotional pull. The film is about learning how to want something, how to compete without losing yourself and how to perform confidence when you’re still figuring out who you are. It’s about families, too — the way parents support, push, hover and sometimes step back. In Nahmias’s hands, cookie booths become stages where modern girlhood is rehearsed in real time.

“That’s really magic for me — when people bring their own experiences and emotions and questions.”

And after months immersed in this world, did she develop a cookie allegiance? She laughs. “The sleeper hit for me when filming this movie was the Lemonades,” she admits, though she’s quick to add, “Thin Mints are a very close second.”

Like the cookies themselves, Cookie Queens turns out to be deceptively simple at first glance, only to reveal layers of sweetness, bitterness, ambition and joy the longer you sit with it. It’s a film born from a mother’s challenge, shaped by a director’s curiosity and carried by four girls who are already learning how big the world can be.

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