Meghan Markle's documentary Cookie Queens is an incisive love letter to innocence

Niti Majethia Mon, August 10, 2026 at 5:42 PM UTC

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Cookie Queens was produced by Meghan Markle and Prince Harry (Image: Roadside Attractions)

**WARNING: SPOILERS BELOW**

Meghan Markle and Prince Harry-produced documentary Cookie Queens may not be the type of film you might typically opt for when you head to the cinema-but that doesn't make it any less worth watching.

Cookie Queens, directed by Alysa Nahmias, follows four tenacious young girls-Ara, Olive, Nikki, and Shannon Elizabeth-during the high-stakes Girl Scout Cookie season as they navigate an $800 million enterprise where childhood innocence and fierce ambition collide, per the IMDb synopsis.

Innocence is of the essence here, as the documentary reckons with what happens when the unadulterated simplicity of childhood comes face to face with competition and performance. Though the theatre was pretty empty when I saw the documentary, it still managed to make me-and the five others watching the film at the AMC-care deeply about the characters.

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5-year-old Ara is the youngest girl featured (Image: Roadside Attractions)

The four girls in the documentary live in different parts of America, but they share the same tenacious ambition: to sell as many Girl Scout cookie boxes as possible. Every child's storyline touches on different struggles: meeting certain goals, dealing with parental pressures, and, for Ara, the youngest girl featured, selling sugary treats while managing Type 1 diabetes.

We see the five-year-old checking her own blood sugar, using an insulin pump, trying to stay disciplined by eating cookies in only tiny, controlled portions, and even baking her own custom sugar-free treats for a local customer with similar health issues.

But what stands out about the story is not just the real-life, very adult-like obstacles each little girl faces; it's the way they move through them. There is a certain freedom in being young and innocent enough not to be self-conscious, not to be pessimistic, and not to lose hope.

Cookie Queens taps into the spirit of childhood innocence (Image: Roadside Attractions)

When eight-year-old Shannon Elizabeth's mom asks her, "Should we be worried?" because not enough cookies are selling, she quips, "No!" And in the next few days, they think outside the box and develop a new plan that, in fact, helps them surpass their goal.

When 12-year-old Olive, a top seller, surpasses her goal, she chooses to question the rights Girl Scouts have-and actually believes she can make a change.

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"I'd like to be a Supreme Court justice," she tells a customer impressed by her skills.

When Ara can't indulge in the cookies the way the other kids can, she chooses to make a sugar-free version instead of losing hope.

And throughout it all, there are moments that tug at your heartstrings-like when a passerby tells Ara they will "be back" for the cookies later as a polite way to decline her offering, and the five-year-old takes her rejection as a promise, choosing to wait for the potential customer as the sun goes down.

The few viewers scattered across the room reacted in real time, gasping, laughing, and sighing. The man next to me smiled ear to ear.

What makes the girls' persistence so striking is the absence of self-consciousness. They ask, they are rejected, they ask again. There is no visible calculation about how they might appear to a stranger, no hesitation born from the possibility of embarrassment.

Childhood, here, offers a peculiar kind of freedom: the freedom to be unabashedly earnest. It makes the viewer realize that no one is born underconfident, or filled with self-doubt, or burdened with the fear of the unknown. These are anchors that come with the burden of adulthood and the price of a longer life lived.

For the longest time, we have been taught that to get ahead, we need to be calculative, read the room, and assess how we might be perceived, but the girls in the documentary succeed exactly because they don't subscribe to this.

"There's always more drama when you're fifteen," one of them quips toward the end.

Watching them, one cannot help but wonder when a simple task became so complicated. As the documentary ends, it unintentionally turns the mirror back at the viewer.

How much of what we call "maturity" is really just us attaching stakes to normal life? What could we accomplish if we weren't afraid of looking foolish?

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”