Following a tepid welcome to her new Buenos Aires high school, Camila is instructed to remove the green handkerchief tied onto her backpack. A symbol of women’s rights, resistance, and pro-choice activism, it’s an unwelcome political display, and the first of many times she will be expected to conform to the school’s rigid code. Brooding, confident and fiery, Camila is quick to find friends as well as lovers, but she remains an inscrutable teenager to her mother. Camila chafes at familial and institutional restrictions, relating more to a volume of Thoreau stumbled upon in the school library, “all good things are wild and free.” As graduation approaches, tensions mount and buried secrets build towards a reckoning.

Accomplished director Inés Barrionuevo deepens her narrative with subtle symbolism, often presenting Camila in reflection, framed by doorways, always in a moody color palette of blues, greys, and browns. While driven by its protagonist, Camila Comes Out Tonight remarks on gender politics, cultural revolution, and the coming-of-age of an empowered, liberated generation in Argentina.