Tribeca: “Sad Girlz” Captures Girlhood Trauma
Fernanda Tovar’s directorial debut, Sad Girlz, premiered in February 2026 at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival, where it won the Crystal Bear award. Now the film will travel stateside to the Tribeca Film Festival for its North American premiere. Sad Girlz is one of those films that, when you learn it’s a directorial debut, really stops you in your tracks. Tovar has great command of the story of girlhood and teenage trauma that threatens to tear a close-knit friendship apart.
© Colectivo Colmena
La Maestra (Rocío Guzmán) and Paula (Darana Álvarez) are your typical, glued-to-the-hip best friends. They do everything together. It’s the sort of adolescent friendship that makes it jarring to see one without the other. They are each their own person, yet so tied together. At La Maestra’s nudging, Paula finds the nerve to talk to her crush at a party, but something happens between them behind closed doors that La Maestra couldn’t have anticipated. This incident becomes a flashpoint for the friends and is perhaps the first time they don’t agree on something that really matters. What loyalty exists when a friend’s wellbeing is called into question?
Much of the success of Sad Girlz lives and dies by how realistic the core friendship appears to be. The performances by Guzmán and Álvarez are so warm. When it’s just the two of them giggling in one of their bedrooms, talking about the silly things teenagers consider to be of the utmost importance, it’s like the viewer is spying on two real-life best friends. Even when things start to sour between them because they disagree about the course of action they should take, there’s still a deep connection between them. They still know this is someone they can trust, even though they feel as if that trust has been broken. It’s these contradictions that allow Sad Girlz to honestly capture adolescent girlhood.
© Colectivo Colmena
In the face of trauma, those affected often shut down. Their silence is taken by others as complacency. Some films about traumatic events are loud, angry, and looking for revenge. Others, like Sad Girlz, are about that silence and how a person like Paula can go from bubbly, goofy, and talkative to silent. How isolating that can feel for someone, La Maestra, who sees themself as their other half. La Maestra wants to take that silence and turn it into fury, but Paula is afraid of that noise. Sad Girlz, beneath the traumatic incident, is a story about two girls trying to process what it means when they don’t agree with their best friend. Their dreamy childhood friendship is now forced to grow up, and it takes them both by surprise.
Sad Girlz is part of a very familiar genre of young girls who are forced to grow up too quickly. We’ve seen similar stories before, but that doesn’t mean Sad Girlz has no merit on its own. The performances from the two leads, the haunting cinematography by Rosa Hadit Hernández, and the guiding vision of Tovar all come together to spectacularly capture girlhood, even when what’s being shown isn’t so rosy.
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