Set on the borderland between childhood and adolescence, between dream and reality, Eva Ilona Brzeski’s 24 GIRLS presents fleeting glimpses of girls on the threshold of maturity and the concomitant loss of innocence. One by one, pre-adolescent girls take the stage to announce and execute their chosen performances, from dancing to singing, poetry reading to storytelling, simultaneously revealing both unhindered childlike freedom and dawning self-consciousness. Carefully juxtaposed with these auditions is Brzeski’s evocative rumination on the short life of one girl who never had the chance to cross over into womanhood, a girl from the director’s past whose early death freezes her at this threshold.