The Diary of a Teenage Girl

Fifteen-year-old Minnie loves comics and is crazy about drawing. She is unsparingly honest when it comes to confessing her most intimate thoughts and experiences to a tape recorder that serves as a diary. She has just had sex for the first time – with her mother’s boyfriend of all people. He is much older than Minnie, but he did not instigate it, she did. Afterwards she is happy and confused. Is it just sex or is it love? From this moment onwards sex governs all Minnie’s thoughts. Do others think like she does? She has no idea. In between her passionate affair with her mother’s boyfriend and hanging out with those of her own age, she tries out all sorts of stuff, including some things she later regrets. There is many a conflict and sometimes she just wants to forget everything. It is the wild San Francisco of the 1970s. The parks are full of long-haired people and drugs are everywhere.
The film is based on Phoebe Gloeckner's graphic novel of the same name. Heller was so taken with it that she first turned it into a stage play and then made it into her debut feature film. Ingeniously integrated comic strip sequences and a period soundtrack lend the film its own particular flavour.