Girls State was shot at the perfect time to be absolutely infuriating

polygon.com:

Back in 2020, filmmaking partners Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss released Boys State, a startling, compulsively watchable documentary that packs all of America’s political flaws into one competitive event. Embedding themselves in the 2018 Texas edition of Boys State, an annual leadership event where a thousand teenage boys are brought together to form a mock U.S. government, McBaine and Moss tracked a handful of participants as they vied for public office, learned terrible lessons about American politics, and alternated between acting like jaded statesmen and acting like teenage boys. One of the most obvious questions coming out of that documentary was: What does the girls’ version of this same event look like?

The filmmakers have answered that question on Apple TV Plus with Girls State, a structurally similar documentary made during the 2022 Missouri edition of the affiliated event for teenage girls. As it turns out, audiences and the filmmakers aren’t the only ones who wondered how the Boys State and Girls State experiences might differ: Over the course of shooting, one of Girls State’s central subjects, Emily Worthmore, launches an investigation into inequalities in the programs’ funding, rules, and focus, and digs up some unsurprising truths. Between those revelations and the exact point in 2022 when the documentary was shot, Girls State is perfectly aligned to be infuriating — and just as telling as Boys State was about the state of America.

Worthmore is one of a small handful of subjects the documentarians stick to, as she lays out her expectations for the program (and her ambitious future political career), enters the event, runs for office, faces disappointment, then launches her investigation into how the boys’ and girls’ programs compare. The downsizing of Worthmore’s ambitions is sobering: Her conviction at the beginning of the movie that she’ll be running for president of the United States by 2040 crumbles over the course of just one week of Girls State.