"A Girl's Own Story" is an award-winning short film from Australia. This one was made back in 1986, so it had its 30th anniversary last year and it is still somewhat known today because writer and director Jane Campion went on to win an Oscar later in her career. It is a black-and-white movie which is of course a creative decision as basically every movie back in the 1980s had already color. It runs for roughly 25 minutes and is an early, but not very early career effort by Campion. The actors and actresses in here are not really well-known and most of them ended their careers a long time ago, some of them even did not appear in any other film before or after this one. It is basically a look into the lives of three girls and we get to watch their every day struggles with boys, parents and each other of course too. I personally felt they were all interchangeable to be honest and not a single one of them ended up memorable in my opinion unfortunately. The directing by Campion is sometimes pretty decent, but the story is just not on a level where I would give this one a thumbs-up. I also usually like black-and-white films and even from that perspective this ended up extremely forgettable. Watch something else instead unless you are a Campion completionist.

A girl growing up in the era when the Beatles were what girls going through puberty obsessed about, deals with her own boring life in a dull fashion.

When I looked at three of Jane Campion's early short subjects, I discovered they were about trivial and boring issues of the moment: the sort of boredom that inspires us to creativity, insanity, or worst of all, to become award-winning film-makers. We all wish to be beautiful, brilliant, desired, living in a stress-free world that engages us at every moment, but over which we have full control. Alas, none of us get that. Some of them, in our daydreams, cause us to say "What was I thinking?"

I'm afraid this short subject is one of those moments. Not only do I not know what I am thinking of, I'm not sure that I know what Miss Campion was thinking about, except possibly that growing up is hard.

Three girls are sexually curious Beatles fans. It's a black and white thirty minute short. It's early in the career of director Jane Campion. It's definitely edgy in its subject matter right from the beginning as the teen girls look at a drawing of the penis. The most daring part is portraying the girls with all the curiosity of real teenagers. There is a dangerous energy about this film. The stories are a little jagged. They need more connective tissue and better flow. The dinner scene is compelling and the cat play scene is unforgettable. I would do away with the music video at the end but I can excuse it as experimental. Apparently, Nicole Kidman at 14 rejected the role because the material is too explicit. This is definitely intriguing for Campion fans.