- - A Short Film About Puppets, Girlhood, and Amanda Seyfried

Laia Garcia-FurtadoFebruary 16, 2026 at 12:57 AM

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A Short Film About Puppets and Girlhood M+M productions - courtesy of Miu Miu

For the past fifteen years, Miu Miu Women’s Tales has been a place for female filmmakers to explore their fantasies and obsessions. For Norwegian director Mona Fastvold, it represented the opportunity to dig deep into something she had been thinking about “for quite a while”—puppets.

“The assignment is really to use the clothes, to some extent, so I wanted that to be the canvas that I was painting on and I really wanted the clothes to take center stage,” she explained on a recent video call. “I started thinking about the costuming in my professional world and dressing yourself, and the separation between the personal and the private self. Then I thought I’d really like to eliminate actors altogether or the people wearing [the clothes] and make it only about the fabric and the garment.”

The action takes place in an all-girls Catholic boarding school run by nuns. Except the girls are not girls at all—or at least not yet—but life-sized unbleached cotton puppets carefully and lovingly maneuvered by dancers. Fastvold found a puppet-maker in California to create the life-sized puppets, then worked closely with her friend, the choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall (who did her own Women’s Tales back in 2017), to unlock the movements that would make the story come alive.

As the puppet-girls wake up to greet the day, they get dressed in blue and white seersucker dresses inspired by one worn by Fastvold to promote her movie The Testament of Ann Lee in Venice, which she described as “feeling like armor.”

“The [spring] collection really made me think of girlhood. I randomly started thinking about Fleur Jaeggy’s Sweet Days of Discipline; of the comfort and love of being in something safe and secure like wearing a uniform and the scary aspects of individualism—especially when you’re younger—and then I have a young daughter who just started middle school, so I’m kind of privy to that constant exploration of identity that happens at that age, when you’re the trying on clothes endlessly and trying to understand ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What am I wearing?’ and ‘What is this person that I’m trying to become?’”

The Miu Miu collections themselves helped guide the action in the film. “I knew I was going to use one piece from [spring 2026]—it was really radical and playful with a lot of masculinity and androgynism,” she describes. “It's so much about female and gender identity, and I thought it was really exciting, very different from this piece. So it felt natural that it was going to be some sort of cocoon/butterfly story, but not into something pristine or perfect, but something that was kind of punk rock and fun.”

Fastvold made the film while promoting her late-2025 musical, The Testament of Ann Lee. She recruited many of her collaborators from the movie to work on her Women’s Tales, including the musician Daniel Blumberg, who created the sparse, sometimes industrial soundtrack that propels the mostly silent movie forward. The dancers, wearing white unitards and with their faces obscured by white masks, move in unison with their puppets. (Fastvold sometimes described them as their “11-year old selves.”) As the actions of their day progress, the idea of who is directing whom becomes blurred, until suddenly there aren’t two bodies moving as one but two bodies in communion with each other. Their ecstatic movements build and build until they explode, and then…a young woman is born. The unspoken desire is that she is only the first to break free and others will soon follow, but Fastvold sees it in more pragmatic terms.

“There’s a comfort in the uniform, but there’s also a restraint and a constraint in that,” she explains. “The cocoon/butterfly journey towards the end is really… I mean, it’s just a choice. It’s not necessarily a moment of utter joy and freedom or anything like that. It’s just a development into something new.”

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”