SXSW ’26: “Summer 2000: The X-Cetra Story” is an Ode to the Weirdo Girlies
This review was originally posted on Film Obsessive.
Think back to who you were when you were ten, twelve years old. Do you remember the friends you had? How they made you feel? The weird hijinks you’d do in secret but would be mortified if the rest of the world found out about them? Imagine that the full-length CD you and your friends made when you were kids suddenly appeared online and went viral. That’s the true story of Ayden, Janet, Jessica, and Mary, four friends from Santa Rosa, California. Premiering at the 2026 SXSW Film & TV Festival, Summer 2000: The X-Cetra Story is a stranger-than-fiction documentary about girlhood in the days of butterfly hairclips.
Ayden, who also serves as the film’s director, has essentially decided to get the band back together in the wake of the realization that their music has gone viral. She still lives in California and now works as an actress. The rest of the friend group, Janet, Jessica, and Mary, have moved across the country. They have jobs, families, pets, and kids, but for all of them, the chance to go back in time and recapture the joy of their accidental music stardom is too fun and surreal to pass up.
The premise of Summer 2000 is mortifying. The viewers are squirming in their seats as they watch, thinking about the weird, shot-for-shot remake of High School Musical they made with their neighborhood friends and what it would be like to see that on the big screen. As the film goes along, though, a critical reshaping of one’s prepubescent follies begins to bloom. Yeah, it was probably weird to record all of High School Musical in your basement without ever going to a basketball court, despite half the movie being about the sport, but it’s also because of it that I’m sitting here today.
Credit: Dessie Jackson
Passion, in this unbridled, unchecked, free-flowing form is cool. Summer 2000 is coming at a time when a generation sees loud, outward emotional expressions as “cringe.” Where does that leave us then? If we’re not making weird art with our friends, what on earth is worth doing? As Ayden states in the documentary, “there’s something special about the people you were friends with during puberty.” It’s an ineffable connection. Sometimes you grow out of it, but sometimes you don’t. No path is the absolutely correct one, but these friends have been given a chance to come back together and clear the air a little. They didn’t end on bad terms, but there was a fracture that came from the realities of growing up. What a gift it is to have a chance to reconnect with people who helped shape your existence.
It becomes obvious that while Summer 2000 is baffled by the sheer absurdity of these circumstances, the documentary is also an ode to the thorniness of girlhood — the expectations of the world at large mixed with the images of young women they were seeing at that age. This is 2000. Body-shaming, misogyny, and anti-female rhetoric were running rampant in the media. Wildly unhealthy body standards were placed on young girls, and there was only ever one version of girlhood presented. The one of a well-mannered, perfectly groomed girl.
Summer 2000: The X-Cetra Story is for the rambunctious, fierce girls who saw the endlessness of adolescence as a chance to try a million different things. To act, to sing, to borrow a line from Hamlet, to dream. It’s a documentary about the dreamers whose sense of creativity had never known borders or boundaries. This is an opportunity for these four friends to get a taste of that again. In their vulnerability, they’ve opened a door back to the kids they once were. Time and space collapse and allow a freedom of expression, creation, and friendship in a way that adults don’t often get to experience again. Summer 2000: The X-Cetra manages to capture both the strangeness of virality online and how much it means for a pre-teen girl to be taken seriously. Long live X-Cetra.
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