In a year packed with oppressively heavy and disspiriting documentaries, a breath of fresh air is Cookie Queens, Alysa Nahmias’ chronicle of four young girls’ efforts, in the face of varying forms of adversity, to meet their goals during Girl Scouts cookie-selling season. The film premiered at Sundance, won the audience award at SXSW and has become the year’s highest-grossing non-celebrity doc.
In late October, Nahmias brought the film to the SCAD Savannah Film Festival, where it screened in the fest’s celebrated Docs to Watch sidebar — followed by a Q&A that you can watch below — and during which she was also one 10 directors of outstanding 2026 docs who appeared on the fest’s Doc to Watch Panel, moderated by yours truly.
Nahmias has been directing and producing docs for the past 20 years. Her focus had long been on art and architecture, but her young kids nudged her to make something that they and their friends could enjoy. When a friend recounted to her his experience of being complimented by a young girl who then then hit him up to buy some of her Girl Scout cookies, she was pretty sure that she found just such a project.
Nahmias, who was never a Girl Scout herself (her mother was a Brownie), felt that chronicling the journeys of several Girl Scouts over the course of one cookie-selling season could be a vehicle to explore girlhood, why women of all ages are underestimated, and more. “I wasn’t actually that interested in the cookies,” she explains. “The Girl Scouts of it all was wonderful and a way in — a delicious way in. But it was sort of honey on the razor’s edge of thinking about what it means to be a girl in American capitalism.”
Nahmias met with Girl Scouts of the USA, but ultimately decided to make a film independent of the nation youth organization that oversees Girl Scouts (and, incidentally, was founded back in 1912 in, of all places, Savannah, Georgia). She set out to “cast” her film with girls representing a diversity of racial and ethnic demographics, economic backgrounds, and geography, ultimately finding seven whose families would consent to her filming them over the course of a six-month stretch, during which Nahmias and her team constantly traversed the country chronicling them.
Stylistically, Nahmias was as inspired by scripted projects about childhood, such as The Florida Project, Moonrise Kingdom and Petit Maman, as she was by documentaries, like Salesman, Spellbound and Boys State. One big takeaway: she always shot from the kids’ POVs. In the end, Nahmias decided to cut out the stories of three girls and focus the film on four: Olive, a smooth-talking go-getter who has something of a tiger mom; Nikki, who dreams of being as cool as her older sisters; Shannon Elizabeth, the sweet child of a financially-strapped couple; and Ara, a diabetic with a bright-eyed view of the world.
Some might assume that the film is a competition doc in which the girls ultimately cross paths, but in fact, they never met until after the film was locked. “I was never interested in how many boxes the girls sold,” Nahmias emphasizes. “I was always interested in their inner journeys.”