Schoolgirls (film)

Celia, an 11-year-old girl, studies at a nuns' school in Zaragoza in 1992. Celia is a good girl: a responsible student and a considerate daughter. The arrival of a new classmate opens a small window through which Celia discovers a whole new world. Together with her new friend and some older girls, Celia enters a new stage of her life: adolescence, a period of firsts. She feels the need to experiment, try new things, and stop being a little girl, even if that entails confronting her mother and everything that once meant comfort and security.

The film is an Inicia Films (Valérie Delpierre) and BTeam Prods (Alex Lafuente) production, with the participation of RTVE, TVC, Televisión de Aragón, and Movistar+, and backing from ICAA and ICEC.^[7][8] It boasted a €1.2 million budget.^[7]

The film premiered in the 'Generation K Plus' section of the 70th Berlin International Film Festival in February 2020.^[9] Its festival run also included screenings at the Brussels International Film Festival (winning the Jury Prize in Directors' Week),^[10] and the 23rd Málaga Film Festival (winning the Golden Biznaga).^[11] Distributed by BTeam Pictures,^[8] Schoolgirls was released theatrically in Spain on 4 September 2020.

Schoolgirls holds a 90% approval rating on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes based on 10 reviews, with an average rating of 8.1/10.^[12]

Jonathan Holland of The Hollywood Reporter summed Schoolgirls up in his bottom line as "Puberty and Prejudice", aligning the film as belonging to the "school-child-focused strain of quality Spanish cinema that stretches back as far as The Spirit of the Beehive".^[13]

• List of Spanish films of 2020