10 Great Movies about Women of Color Coming of Age

It’s Women’s History Month! While these stories, like the lives of women, deserve to be celebrated year-round, the spirit of this month’s commemoration warrants a delicious list to remind everyone of some great movies. The bildungsroman, or the coming-of-age story, was created by a white cishet man to talk about the emotional growth of white cishet male characters. While some have taken the essentialist origin of this narrative framework to mean that the tenets of “coming-of-age” are not applicable to women and/or queer people, there are some spectacular films that showcase the becoming of young women of color nonetheless. Although I—like other film lovers—would love even more coming-of-age stories about underrepresented youth, this March is a great time to spotlight the work of dazzling filmmakers like Gurinder Chadha, Nijla Mu’min and Minhal Baig, all of whom have used their talents to share wonderful stories about girls of color growing up.
Here are 10 great movies about women of color coming of age:
Bend It Like Beckham (2002)
Director: Gurinder Chadha
British filmmaker Gurinder Chadha has made a plethora of fun coming-of-age films with stellar soundtracks, including Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging and 2019’s Bruce Springsteen-centric Blinded by the Light. But the bildungsroman for which Chadha is perhaps most renowned is the 2002 romantic comedy/sports film Bend it Like Beckham. Bend it Like Beckham follows Jesminder “Jess” Bhamra (Parminder Nagra), an 18-year-old British-Indian girl with amazing football skills who idolizes David Beckham. Jess struggles to assert her own authentic girlhood as she navigates her parents’ gendered cultural expectations of her and disapproval of her athletic aspiration. When Jess befriends Juliette (Keira Knightley), a fellow female footballer, and secretly joins the local women’s football team for which Juliette plays, she embarks upon a complicated emotional journey in which she must choose between her dreams and complying with her parent’s vision of the kind of woman she should be. Bend it Like Beckham’s strengths lie not only in its ability to gracefully blend multiple genres—sports, family dramedy, romance— but also in the ways in which it honors the cultural relativism of “coming-of-age.” Bonus points for getting Bollywood legend Anupam Kher to play Jess’ dad.
Premature (2019)
Director: Rashaad Ernesto Green
Premature is a heart-wrenching, Harlem-set film about romance, tenderness and departure. Director Rashaad Ernesto Green co-wrote the film with the film’s star, Zora Howard. Howard plays 17-year-old Ayanna, a young poet who falls in love with Isaiah (Joshua Boone), an older music producer, the summer before she leaves for college. Initially, Ayanna—with her quiet and calculated nature—is reluctant to Isaiah’s advances, but her ultimate surrender to her reciprocal feelings of attraction opens up a world of emotion that challenges her self-perception and vision of the future. Premature’s grainy aesthetic further enhances the film’s hyper-realistic feel. It’s a film simple in plot but abundant in mood and atmospheric allure. Ayanna’s playful exchanges with her friends, her strained relationship with her mother and quotidian rides on the train immerse the audience in her personal, summertime world of Harlem. There’s an interior access and lived-in-ness that Green and Howard collaboratively achieve with their influence on the film. More so, Premature lives in that elusive middle ground of telling a story about a woman in the thrall of love without suggesting that romance is what makes this woman worthy of narrative attention.
Real Women Have Curves (2002)
Director: Patricia Cardoso
If you’re looking for a coming-of-age film about a California girl whose intellect and cunning leaves her daydreaming of a life in NYC, despite the disapproval of her anxiety-prone mother, look no further than Lady Bird—I mean Real Women Have Curves. This 2002 dramedy, based on the eponymous stage play written by Josefina López, follows Ana García (America Ferrera) a girl from East L.A. who travels to attend Beverly Hills High, where she is a top student. With the encouragement of her favorite teacher Mr. Guzman (George Lopez), Ana applies to Columbia University despite the high expense and the apprehension of her parents. In this career-launching role, Ferrera gives a stellar performance that integrates the complexities of managing intercultural expectations, economic insecurity and—as the title suggests—rampant fatphobia. Ana, like her older sister Estela (Ingrid Oliu) and mother Carmen (Lupe Ontiveros), works in a clothing factory. Through Ana’s vocational work, the film showcases the seldom-represented experiences of young people for whom early work is a financial, familial obligation rather than a character-building opportunity. Real Women Have Curves also does well to position college as an exclusive, sometimes affordable experience rather than an inevitable rite of passage that is tacit to coming of age. Look out for an amazing scene in which Ana, Estela and fellow women factory workers undress and compare their stretch marks while on the clock.
Hala (2019)
Director: Minhal Baig
Writer/director Minhal Baig’s Hala is an intimate coming-of-age drama held up by its personal writerly touches and a star-making turn from Geraldine Viswanathan as the title character. Hala’s struggling with the same kinds of things we normally see high school characters struggle with: What to do after graduation, how to manage a relationship with her parents that’s not quite adult and not quite childish, and (of course) boys. Viswanathan’s understated quiet and the warmth in which the situations are shot (almost always centered on her face)—be they at a family dinner or a walk in a Chicago park or a reading of a high school English assignment—make the dramatic ricochet of Hala’s minor rebellion rattle us all the harder. Her relationship with a poetry-loving floppy-haired boy, her parents’ imperfections and a boatload of baggage brought from Pakistan (including the threat of arranged marriage) create a compelling portrait of a family that overcomes Baig’s sometimes sleepy direction. While there’s a lot, probably too much, going on around Hala—to the point that the movie threatens to shake apart—and the film tends to raise issues it’d rather not see through to any sort of conclusion, some striking shots, realistic dialogue (even in that heightened “everything’s the end of the world” way that teens can have) and Viswanathan’s ability to sell it all make the film a worthy and unique entry into the coming-of-age canon. —Jacob Oller