Detailed Information on Publication Record

We can see many archetypal and standard ways of showing girl characters in contemporary mainstream cinema for youth. This paper deals with the representation of girls in so called art cinema and is about the way how screenwriters are challenging their girl characters to not to fit into the (standard) box. The main questions for me are: What are the stereotypes we can recognize in these characters? And how we can avoid them and show another scale of girlhood? Is it possible that cinema for youth could encourage the target audience (obviously mainly girls but I wouldn’t like to leave out boys from this topic) to be more sensitive and aware of the ways how girls can behave, react in specific situation, or just look like? In my presentation I want to direct your attention to problems which are connected to showing young girls in stereotypical way and talk about pushing the boundaries in creative process of developing girl characters nowadays. My main focus and interest in displaying girl characters in films for youth is based on my doctoral research about contemporary art cinema for youth and also on differences we can notice in comparison with mainstream coming of age drama or teen film.