Paloma Schneideman takes a selfie with cast and crew before the “Big Girls Don’t Cry” premiere at The Ray Theatre on January 24, 2026, during the 2026 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Arturo Holmes/Getty Images)

By Cecilia Santini

In Big Girls Don’t Cry, 14-year-old Sid (Ani Palmer) navigates teenage sexuality and social dynamics over the course of a summer break in 2006. She lives in a small New Zealand beach town with her emotionally absent father (Noah Taylor), who doesn’t pay attention to her or parent her through her confusion. Her loneliness and longing to grow up, along with her sexual confusion and explorations of the early internet, culminate in a crush on an older girl (Beatrix Rain Wolfe), which pushes Sid to befriend a more mature group of teenagers she doesn’t truly fit in with.

The film, playing in the 2026 Sundance Film Festival’s World Cinema Dramatic Competition, is writer-director Paloma Schneideman’s debut feature. It’s an honest depiction of a pivot point in one girl’s life — capturing her at a vulnerable moment when she’s desperate to leave childhood behind but hasn’t gotten there yet.

After the film’s premiere at The Ray Theatre in Park City, Schneideman talked about the importance movies have had in her own life and how that inspired this story: “Films have always helped me to understand myself, way more than — growing up in rural New Zealand — my community could, because we just weren’t having those kinds of conversations. … I’m in love with the coming of age genre. … Every time a film is made like that, the dialog’s open and the shame’s distilled, and we feel more comfortable speaking. Speaking is healing, and I had been given that by so many films that were so formative to me that I’d love to pass on that legacy and give that back.”

Sex and desire in all their excitement, anxiety, and ambivalence hang over the film from the very first scene. Older boys tease and mock Sid but also want to exploit her sexually, and she portrays herself as more experienced than she actually is. “It’s a film that explores the first taste of sexual power and how to get it and how to lose it and what that means,” Schneideman says.

Queerness is an undercurrent that runs through Big Girls Don’t Cry, with Sid facing the question of whether she wants to be like her friend or be with her. Sid doesn’t have anyone to talk to about her feelings, but point-of-view camerawork shows where her attention is drawn, clueing the audience in on her interests and attractions. 

These themes and struggles are conveyed most of all through a beautifully evocative lead performance from first-timer Palmer. There is no voiceover, and Sid is seldom honest about her feelings — “She just tells lies and lies and lies!” Schneideman jokes at one point. But Palmer carries the weight of the character’s emotions and interiority, playing difficult and nuanced emotional states without words. While the people around Sid might not recognize what she’s experiencing, the audience does.

“Before each scene, [Schneideman would] come up to me and try to explain what’s going on, what’s underneath it, which was really helpful since this was the first film I’ve done,” Palmer says during the Q&A after the screening, to applause.

The burgeoning internet, soon to transform teenage years and childhood forever, is a presence from the beginning of the movie, especially the options it offers young people to explore sex — sometimes innocently, sometimes dangerously. Being a teenager is always confusing, and the movie offers a window into a now-vanished moment in time when that experience was just beginning to be rendered even more confusing by online life.

“It felt like a really fitting backdrop for a coming of age story, because it wasn’t just this young woman on the edge of discovering her sexuality and her identity, but the nation was coming of age as well,” Schneideman explains about the decision to set the film in the mid-2000s. “Things were changing for us socially and politically, and technology was doing crazy things, so I felt like the pairing of the two would make this really great pressure cooker.”

While the film feels personal and true, it invites viewers to see themselves in it and interpret it in their own way. “The biggest tragedies are contextual to the life you know, and things keep moving, and it’s everything and it’s nothing,” Schneideman says about the moments that make up our lives. “I wanted to really invite viewers to project their own understanding and their own means to resolve it for themselves instead of pushing them to feel a certain type of way. It’s really a film that invites you to project your own experience and understanding onto it. I don’t have the answers; I’m just the transmitter of information.”