Alysa Nahmias’ “Cookie Queens” (EP’d by the real-life royal duo of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle) follows an ethnically and economically diverse, too-cute-for-words quartet of girls, ages five to 12, during Girl Scout cookie season. It’s that most consumerist time of the year when troop members race to hawk as many Thin Mints and Do-si-dos over a six-week period in order to reach their individual predetermined sales goals (and thus win prizes, including international trips for the highest earners).
The eldest of the ones we meet is Olive, a fair-skinned blonde wise beyond her years. She’s also the best of the best in her high-selling, Charlotte, NC middle school troop. Next is nine-year-old Nikki, a Black girl in a majority-white community in Chino, CA. Nikki is actually a “Juliette” — an independent Girl Scout — who idolizes her teenage sisters Nyah and Nala, top-sellers in an older troop co-led by their mom. Then there’s Shannon Elizabeth of El Paso, Texas, an eight-year-old who like Nikki is a Brownie and a girl of color (in this case Latinx and Native American). But unlike Nikki, who covets a huge trophy and perhaps even a trip to Europe, Shannon Elizabeth needs to sell cookies just to afford the price of summer camp. Finally, the youngest is Ara, another Californian, who at age five is a Daisy. She’s also a type one diabetic, and thus only gets to consume tiny amounts of her sugary wares.
It’s an engaging if well-trodden setup, enhanced by the director’s slick but artful aesthetics. Yet Nahmias (“Unfinished Spaces”) deploys this familiar formula, filled with colorful images and a jaunty score, in unexpected ways, patiently letting her protagonists deliver some cookie-crumbling punches in the process. Take Olive, for instance, easily the most media-savvy of the bunch. Fluent in corporate-speak (the doc opens with her explaining upselling to her troop), she mentions to one customer that she wants to be a Supreme Court Justice when she grows up; later, she privately offers that she likewise wants to form a group to fight for Girl Scout rights since cookie-selling is “basically child labor.” She sings a different tune in public, however, telling a smitten TV news anchor that she enjoys selling cookies and “hanging out with my friends and making memories.” In a post-interview debrief with her bestie, Olive assesses the appearance as okay but “not really good for business.”
Indeed, what’s left offscreen is the fact that this purportedly entrepreneurial grit-building exercise is in fact a massive money-making racket for Big Cookie — to the tune of around $800 million in just those six weeks. While all four of the Scouts come from incredibly loving nuclear families, supportive to the point of often serving as social media advisors, one can’t help but wonder how healthy this “wholesome” endeavor truly is. Although the organization’s stated mission is to build “girls of courage, confidence, and character, who make the world a better place,” GSA seems more the ideological/indoctrinating capitalist equivalent of the USSR’s Young Pioneers. (Which is especially egregious in the case of a young one like Shannon Elizabeth, whose working class parents find themselves foregoing mortgage payments to pay for the boxes of cookies that their daughter then sells to benefit The Man.)
And just as troubling is how acutely aware these girls are of the fact that they’re not just selling cookies but also themselves — specifically their “cuteness” — in order to make money. (And for Nikki, whose older siblings call her “the hook,” a way to please them as well.) So perhaps it’s not surprising when Olive begins to have a sort of existential crisis. She admits she doesn’t really want to sell cookies anymore, but being the top seller is her role in the troop, one that she thinks of as “kind of like a job.” If she gave that up she wonders, “What would I be?” Indeed, she’s startlingly hyperconscious, to the point of knowing she’s expected to play the part of straight-out-of-central-casting “child” for the adults around her.
And then there’s tiny Ara, who practices her sales pitch by phone with her doting dad, assuring him that the best deal is 20 sandwich cookies (“so that’s really 40 cookies”). Unlike Olive and Nikki, whose overly involved mothers appear to be living vicariously through them, Ara’s father is determined to let his daughter lead rather than pushing her to “achieve.” She also might be the true rebel of the bunch, as she doesn’t seem to frankly give a damn how many Samoas she sells. She’d just as soon play piano, do pilates, or bake her own sugar-free treats to sell to all the diabetic customers who have to count their carbs like she does. Which is fortunately the kind of entrepreneurial spirit that might one day put a corporate cookie monster out of business for good.
Grade: B-
“Cookie Queens” premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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