Big Girls Don’t Cry opens the NZ International Film Festival – and a vein

Big Girls Don’t Cry opens the NZ International Film Festival – and a vein

Off the back of a big win at Biarritz, Paloma Schneideman’s unmistakably New Zealand coming-of-age film has arrived to transport audiences to the lonely aching of adolescence. Ani Palmer plays 14-year-old Sid as she stumbles through a Kiwi summer around Omaha, face pressed up against the window of adulthood, confused, self-conscious, anguished and selfish.  The promise of sex – and the threat of it too – hangs heavily, as the squeal of dial-up i…