Jennifer Reeder and the Teen Autonomous Zone

Filmmaker Jennifer Reeder comes to the Walker Cinema this summer as artist-in-residence and guest curator. Reeder’s surreal and comedic personal films center the secretive lives of adolescent girls, often acting in packs to survive the traumas of teenage life. Filled with high school choir renditions of ’80s-era anthems, Reeder’s films are both homage and critique of the teen films she grew up with. Reeder imagines a teen cinematic world where girls in hijab kick skater boys out of the park, read Octavia Butler, and idolize both Joan Didion and Joan Jett.

Complementing the screenings of her own films, Reeder guest curates the Walker’s summer cinema series. Her selections—Larry Clark’s Kids (1995), Amy Heckerling’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), and Ronald Maxwell’s Little Darlings (1980)—show unsupervised and unsurveilled youth sewing themselves into their sexual skins.

Each in their own way funny, cringey, and problematic, these films continue to raise questions about what is authentic to teen life and what is exploitative. As unique snapshots of the time and culture that produced them, they are as much a reflection of youth as an influence on the lives of young people who watched them.