Cookie Queens: “The way that the world sees girls and women and the way we know ourselves to be are not always in sync.”

vHopeful Conversations Podcast · Sep 17, 2026 · 25m

In this vHopeful Conversation, I speak with Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Alysa Nahmias about Cookie Queens, her joyful, incisive documentary following four Girl Scouts through the high-stakes world of cookie-selling season. What begins as a lively look at an $800 million enterprise becomes a rich coming-of-age portrait of ambition, friendship, family, class, confidence, performance, and the early lessons girls absorb about value, success, femininity, and power. Alysa shares how a challenge from her own children inspired her to make a documentary that could engage younger audiences, how she…