AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Can you name all the different Girl Scout Cookies?
(SOUNDBITE OF MOVIE, "COOKIE QUEENS")
UNIDENTIFIED GIRL SCOUT #1: Thin Mints, Adventurefuls, S'mores.
RASCOE: The Girl Scouts waiting outside your local grocery store sure can. Across the country, these young entrepreneurs move around 200 million boxes of cookies every year, and they do it all in the span of one cookie season. It's a major fundraising effort. The bakeries that make the cookies pay licensing fees to the national organization. That's after making commitments to buy and resell a certain number of boxes. And where the rubber hits the parking lot, when it comes to that, the girls themselves - that's where filmmaker Alysa Nahmias focused her camera. Her new documentary is called "Cookie Queens," and she joins us now. Welcome to the program.
ALYSA NAHMIAS: Hi, Ayesha. Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here.
RASCOE: How did you decide to focus on Girl Scout Cookies as a subject for a movie?
NAHMIAS: So I was not a Girl Scout myself, but my mom was a Girl Scout, and so I'd always heard about it. This is my fourth feature documentary as a director. And my children, who, at the time, were 9 and 11 about three years ago when I started this project, they watched my last film called "Art & Krimes By Krimes," and they liked it. And then afterwards, at dinner, my daughter said, but, Mom, do you think you could make your next one one that we really want to share with our friends?
You know, at the time, I sort of laughed. But then I also thought about it a lot and thought, there's got to be something that I can find that would work for young people but also have, you know, themes and ideas that I could explore. The Girl Scout Cookie sale came up, and I thought about not only, you know, it being a visually interesting world and could kind of span a lot of geography and life experiences, but also it was going to be something that I could explore in terms of what it means to come of age as a girl today and sort of how the world sees us and how we see ourselves and how those things aren't always synced up.
RASCOE: You know, I have to disclose, I was a Girl Scout for a little while. I made it to being a Brownie. That's as far as I got.
NAHMIAS: All right.
RASCOE: We meet a lot of Girl Scouts in this movie, but the film really follows these four young girls, Ara, Nikki, Olive and Shannon Elizabeth. They have different motivations. Like, Nikki wants to be a top seller. Olive wants to keep breaking records. Ara wants to meet her sell goal for her first ever season, selling 55 boxes, if I remember correctly. Their parents have a lot of motivation, too, and I was really fascinated because, with Shannon Elizabeth, not only does she want to sell enough cookies so she can get to camp - so her camp will be paid for - but her parents need to sell enough cookies to keep them out of cookie debt, which I didn't know anything about.
NAHMIAS: Yeah. Girl Scout Cookies, you know - you can take on as much as you want or as little as you want. Some families go big. Girls set their goals. Families can get those boxes up front if they want to have all those boxes, and then they are on the hook.
Shannon Elizabeth's family takes on a significant amount of cookies, and they're a family who couldn't otherwise afford to send their daughter to this kind of camp. And so it means a lot to their daughter. It means a lot to them. So we're really feeling the sort of high stakes for both Shannon Elizabeth and her parents as they take on this really risky and audacious goal.
RASCOE: You can't just give the cookies back?
NAHMIAS: I know, right? Once the families decide to take on the cookies, you don't give it back. And I think that's something that, for me, is bigger than Girl Scouts and Girl Scout Cookies in the sense that when we look at our cultural landscape and our economy, there's so much that families take on for their kids, you know?
RASCOE: Yeah.
NAHMIAS: Whether it's education debt, health care, or activities and things like that. So I wanted the film to be able to show how that functions with something as simple as Girl - as seemingly simple as Girl Scout Cookies. And hopefully, that also allows us to feel empathy around other big risks or goals that families take on for their kids.
RASCOE: Well, let's talk about Olive because, yes, she is a cookie selling machine. She seems to enjoy it. But it also seems clear that she feels pressure from her mom and from herself.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "COOKIE QUEENS")
OLIVE: Everyone has, like, a place in the troop. My place is being the top seller, and that's, like, my role in the troop. And if I wasn't the top seller, what would I be, you know?
RASCOE: That's such a deep question for a young girl to ask. Like, what...
NAHMIAS: Yeah.
RASCOE: ...Do you make of that stress and pressure that Olive and these other girls are under?
NAHMIAS: Yeah, she's 12 years old when she says that to her best friend. It's real. I relate to it both in looking back in my childhood and being an ambitious girl. And I look at it now, even as a professional, you know, as a filmmaker and thinking about the goals we have and the identities that we forge for ourselves and how sometimes those can put pressure on ourselves, whether that pressure is internal or external or both.
And I feel that as a parent, too, with my kids. Like, you know, do we sometimes push too hard as parents? I think sometimes we do. And then also are there ways in which kids can put undue pressure on themselves? I think so. And Olive articulates that so beautifully, and I think it's such a universal feeling that so many of us have.
RASCOE: We have to talk about Ara. She was one of my favorites. I just loved Ara. She had those big cute cheeks, and she was just like, how could anyone resist her?
NAHMIAS: Well, yeah, so Ara's 5 years old in the film. She's in kindergarten.
RASCOE: Yeah.
NAHMIAS: And yeah, I mean, as soon as I saw her casting tape, my producer and I all were like, OK, well, she's in the film.
RASCOE: (Laughter).
NAHMIAS: It wasn't just her presence but also her brilliance and her...
RASCOE: Yes.
NAHMIAS: ...Real desire to master the cookie program. Not only is she trying to figure out how to sell Girl Scout Cookies, she's trying to figure out how the economy works. And I was impressed by how a 5-year-old - and she's not the only one - how these young girls can understand so much not only about how the economy works, but also about big questions that are sort of existential questions about it. Like, what is fair, you know? Who should profit? And Ara starts to ask those questions, and it's just magic because when a 5-year-old asks, you're like, oh, that's a good question, you know?
RASCOE: (Laughter) There's a lot of footage of Girl Scouts selling cookies in this film. I bet plenty of people have found themselves in this situation before.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "COOKIE QUEENS")
UNIDENTIFIED GIRL SCOUT #2: You kind of want to just bargain them to buy more cookies. Try to trick them to buy more cookies.
UNIDENTIFIED GIRL SCOUT #3: Just like if their favorite candy is Reese's, say, we have...
UNIDENTIFIED GIRL SCOUT #2: We have a cookie that...
UNIDENTIFIED GIRL SCOUT #3: Tagalongs.
UNIDENTIFIED GIRL SCOUT #2: ...Just tastes like Reese's.
RASCOE: There's obviously a big emphasis on the girls being good salespeople. They're being taught to upsell, which was...
NAHMIAS: They're strategic.
RASCOE: They're strategic.
NAHMIAS: They are definitely strategic.
RASCOE: But in your view, is that about giving these girls a skill, or does it lean more towards using them?
NAHMIAS: I think it's important for us as girls and women to learn how business works, how the economy works. It's a useful skill. We all live in the context of capitalism in America, and I think learning how that works and asking questions about it is important. In the film, we see the girls question, especially these top sellers, what their agency is. And so I think the girls question not only how much they're getting per box, but also the amount of agency and voice and power they have to determine how the rest of the money gets spent by their local councils.
RASCOE: That's Alysa Nahmias. Her new documentary, "Cookie Queens," is out now. Thank you so much for joining us.
NAHMIAS: Thank you, Ayesha. Great to be here.
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