Confessions of a Suburban Girl

Directed by Susan Seidelman

This autobiographical documentary takes its place alongside similar efforts by film directors John Boorman and Nagisa Oshima, all of them commissioned by BBC Scotland. Key revelations take place while she and some of her old girl-pals hang around in one of their old bedrooms, daring one another to tell the truth about all sorts of events known to one another. She confesses to having been an unbearably good girl given to idolizing the "bad" girls in her neighborhood and says that part of the reason she became a filmmaker was in order to get others to act out her darker fantasies. In addition to these and similar reminiscences and some black-and-white re-creations of the past, the film includes clips from some of the director's better-known films, clips which illustrate some of her teen fantasies.