Girls Rebel

There’s no better way to kick off a new year of cinema-going than watching girls go gloriously off the rails in Girls Rebel, QUAD’s January film series. The girls at the heart of these films are not (just) performing rebellion in the tidy language of “empowerment,” nor are they interested in being reduced to labels like “troubled.” Sometimes pushing back against the suffocating logic of adulthood, sometimes against patriarchy, and sometimes against nothing more—or less—than boredom itself, their acts of self-invention take the form of refusal, excess, and outright destruction.

Across four films from three different countries, five heroines channel their discontent into gestures that unsettle the worlds around them and expose the fragile structures of authority that seek to confine them.