it's so confusing sometimes to be a...💋🎀🫧GIRL🫧🎀💋

coming march'26

What does girlhood look like on screen? How has that representation changed over the years? Who gets to be a girl in film — and who gets left out?

This March, the month in which we celebrate International Women’s Day, we take a look at girlhood on screen. GIRL is inspired by the Girlhood exhibition at MoMu Antwerp and takes its questions into the cinema. The program looks at how films have shaped our ideas of girlhood: not as an age, but as a social concept, a mood, a way of being. Something that can stick with you long after childhood. Or, as Charli xcx puts it: “I’m just a girl, but that doesn’t mean I’m not in control.”

Cinema has given us iconic girlhood images (friendship, freedom, fantasy, fun) but also presents a lot of baggage. The pressure to be hot but effortless, cute but not childish, desirable but not “too much.” Think makeover movies, body obsession, the cool-girl myth, romantic tropes we secretly love and side-eye at the same time. 

This program brings together films that made a difference, films we grew up with, and films that challenge familiar clichés and present voices that deserve to be heard. We’re especially interested in what’s missing: young queer girlhood, stories that aren’t only serious or about coming out, and representations that allow girls to be messy, funny, angry, bored or powerful.

GIRL is about recognition — and the lack of it.

About pressure and power.

And about why girlhood on film still matters.

It’s confusing to be a girl, but in sharing the confusion, girlhood really comes together