Paloma Schneideman debut ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry’ set for UK release
Peccadillo Pictures will release Paloma Schneideman's debut feature Big Girls Don't Cry in UK and Irish cinemas from Friday 27 November. The 99-minute film, certified 15, follows fourteen-year-old Sid during the summer holidays in rural New Zealand in 2006. Over one transformative summer she discovers desire, identity and the internet while imitating the people she longs to be loved by.
The film premiered at Sundance and received its UK premiere at BFI Flare before winning the Grand Prix at Biarritz’s Nouvelles Vagues festival. Presenting the award, actor and director Kristen Stewart said: “I loved this film with my whole heart.” It opened to critical acclaim in New Zealand, with The Guardian noting that “Schneideman gets the small moments just right.”
During the summer holidays in rural New Zealand, fourteen-year-old Sid has little to occupy her time. Her father has largely checked out, and her only window onto a bigger life is a borrowed MSN account. Online and off, she watches older teenagers who appear to move through the world with ease and tries on their attitudes like stolen clothes. Her feelings combine envy with an emotion she does not yet have words for.
Newcomer Ani Palmer gives a fearless lead performance as Sid. The cast also includes Noah Taylor, known for Peaky Blinders and Almost Famous, and Rain Spencer, seen in Good Girl Jane and The Summer I Turned Pretty. Executive producers are Jane Campion and Philippa Campbell, with producers Vicky Pope and Thomas Coppell.
Writer-director Paloma Schneideman drew on her own adolescence. She said: “Somewhere, in some patch of bush in some country, there’s a girl doing something she doesn’t want to do, just to be accepted by people she doesn’t even like.” The film holds up a mirror to that time “not to moralise, but to acknowledge it: it was messy, confusing, joyful and painful.” Mentor Jane Campion reminded Schneideman that Sid needed “an innate charisma, someone you could watch do absolutely nothing and still be fascinating.” Schneideman found this quality in Ani Palmer after about seven seconds of her first audition tape, sensing “the stillness, the vulnerability, the unspoken pull.” She added that the story remains urgent: “We like to believe we’ve reached a moment where speaking openly about these things is effortless, but I know, in my body, that the distance between permission and freedom is still wide.”
In her director’s note Schneideman stated she made the film for her fourteen-year-old self, seeking catharsis rather than comfort for those who still carry scars from coming of age where shame lives and desire and danger blur. The story explores liminal spaces between girl and woman, consent and non-consent, being desired and being seen, and the cost of not knowing the difference. Developed over five years yet lived far longer through ancestors and communities, the narrative centres on Sid’s intense wish to be seen and chosen, leading her to hide inside versions of herself that are not real. She mimics, seduces and provokes, performing identities like costumes as a girl who cannot cry and whose deep shame forces her to act bravely. The director sought to tell the truth without flinching or moralising, holding discomfort long enough to see what lies beneath. She positions the work as a departure from typical New Zealand cinema shaped by rugged masculinity, stoicism or larrikin humour, offering instead emotional risk, interiority and feminine truth. The film resists resolution and lives in the ambiguity of queer adolescence, where fantasy precedes language, silence both protects and isolates, and the longing to be chosen can override the ability to choose. Growth is framed not as hardening or being chosen by someone else but as asking to be loved like a child: gently, fully, without having to earn it. Personal and political, the film is vulnerable by design, a reckoning with identity, shame, desire and the parts of ourselves once told to hide, in the hope of creating space for recognition, softness and acceptance.
Preview screenings begin from 8 November. A press screening is scheduled for 11 November at The Arzner in London, followed by a Q&A with director Paloma Schneideman.
Peccadillo Pictures, founded in 2000, specialises in LGBTQ+, independent and world cinema. The company highlights new voices through diverse, thought-provoking films that audiences might otherwise not see. It has built a reputation for distributing award-winning independent films, documentaries and shorts focused on sexuality, gender identity and cultural diversity, and continues to support emerging filmmakers while releasing work through cinemas, television, home entertainment, digital platforms and its own streaming service.
