A trailer has landed for “White Girl,” Elizabeth Wood’s feature directorial debut. The film premiered to rave reviews at Sundance, where it was compared to Larry Clark’s “Kids,” another gritty coming-of-age story.
“White Girl” follows Leah (Morgan Saylor, “Homeland”), a white college student who falls hard and fast for Blue, a Puerto Rican drug dealer (Brian “Sene” Marc of Netflix’s upcoming “Luke Cage”). Rather than calling it quits when Blue is arrested, Leah decides to save him by any means necessary. She sells Blue’s cocaine so that she can pay for a lawyer to help get him out of jail and settle his debt with another dealer.
The film is semi-autobiographical. As Wood told Women and Hollywood, “It’s a personal story.”
The newly released NSFW spot for “White Girl” contains no dialogue, but the footage still manages to communicate a great deal. For starters, the NYC-set story is chock-full of sex and drugs. The trailer straddles the line between dreamy and nightmarish as Leah’s infatuation leads her to take increasingly dangerous risks. It seems as though the film fearlessly tackles four taboo subjects: race, gender, class, and drugs.
Wood, who was named one of Variety’s 10 Directors to Watch in 2016, co-helmed the 2007 doc “Wade in the Water, Children,” a feature centered on a free arts program in a New Orleans community post-Katrina.
“I read about women feeling like they are punished for being emotional, crying, etc., and I just don’t think that is something anyone should worry about,” Wood shared with Women and Hollywood. “You cry? You get emotional? Who cares. It’s powerful to show how you feel, and anyway, men are emotional and cry too!”
She said that one of the biggest challenges of making “White Girl” was breastfeeding during production. She “completely underestimated the complications of pumping on set.” Wood managed to make it work, and explained, “having a kid actually kept me really grounded. When everyone else was freaking out, I was like, ‘Whatever, this is nothing: I have a freaking baby.’”
“White Girl” opens in theaters this fall. It will also stream on Netflix.
