Summer 2006, rural New Zealand. 14-year-old Sid Bookman is caught between childhood and adolescence, navigating a burgeoning sexual curiosity and a desperate desire for acceptance. Her coastal town is quiet and contained, but glimpses of life beyond— flickering reality TV, American pop culture, and the occasional seedy chatroom—ignite both longing and restless possibility. Each summer, wealthy out-of-towners arrive, carrying with them a world Sid can only imagine. Drawn to their effortless glamour and an older group of teens, she shape shifts through versions of herself, hoping one might be enough. But the harder she tries, the more chaos she creates. Everything changes when her sister returns from university with Freya, a magnetic friend from America, whose attention awakens something Sid can’t yet name. As New Year’s Eve nears—her imagined gateway to adulthood—Sid must confront the painful gap between who she is and who she’s pretending to be. Director Paloma Schneideman joins us to talk about this tender, unflinching portrait of queer adolescence, class shame, and identity, told through the intimate, unvarnished lens of New Zealand girlhood at a moment when the wider world was beginning to seep in. About the filmmaker - Paloma Schneideman is a writer, director, and musician based in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland, New Zealand. She has worked across the film and music industries for a decade, with her work thematically gravitating towards the female experience, particularly queer perspectives and stories rooted in the human condition; exploring family, intimacy, and identity. Paloma was 1 of 10 participants hand selected by Dame Jane Campion to participate in her intensive film program 'A Wave In The Ocean’ in 2023. Throughout the program Paloma worked intensively with leading industry professionals, mentored by Jane, and out put a series of works that displayed a growing and unique directorial voice and signature. Paloma has applied all these learnings to her debut feature film, Big Girls Don't Cry, funded by the NZ Film Commission, and the first feature film to come from an alumni of the 'A Wave in the Ocean’ program. Paloma's most recent short film Gate Crash was commissioned by Toi Whakaari performing arts school in 2022, and was selected for NZIFF’s Best Short competition as well as Melbourne International Film Festival in 2023, obtaining a place in the renowned ‘Accelerator Lab.’ Her short films Memory Foam (2019) and Mine (2016) were both selected for NZIFF. In 2020 she obtained a NZFC Gender Scholarship, a placement in Script to Screen’s FilmUp intensive, and a director’s attachment on Armagan Ballentyne’s Nude Tuesday film. As a musician, she produces and performs music under the alias PollyHill, which has seen perform in some of New Zealand's biggest music festivals like Splore, Laneway, Othersway, and supporting international acts Arlo Parks, Kae Tempest, and Wiki. At the end of 2023, Paloma (PollyHill) released a collaborative album with Samara Alofa Aquaries - Age of Uranus., funded by NZ On Air, which has attracted acclaim from Rolling Stone magazine and Vice. The album won the 2025 Aotearoa Alternative Awards Best Song and Best EP.
