The Girls Who Own the Pool

Prinzessinnenbad—"Princess Pool"—is a 2007 documentary by Bettina Blümner about three teenage girls growing up in Berlin-Kreuzberg: Klara, Mina, and Tanutscha. They’re regulars at the neighborhood outdoor pool, smoking and drinking and falling in love and picking fights and doing everything teenagers do when they assume no one is paying close attention. Blümner paid attention for years before turning on a camera, and it shows. These girls move through the film like they own it, because they basically do.

Kreuzberg has always been a neighborhood that mythologizes itself—rough edges, immigrant families, punks and artists and people who ended up there because rent was cheap and stayed because it became home. A documentary about teenage girls in that environment could easily slip into sociological voyeurism, cataloguing hardship with a sympathetic lens. Blümner doesn’t do that. She just stays close. The result feels less like documentation and more like memory—not your memory specifically, but particular enough to activate your own.