Indie 90s: Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995)
Director: Todd Solondz Run Time: 88 min. Rating: R Release Year: 1996
Starring: Brendan Sexton III, Daria Kalinina, Eric Mabius, Heather Matarazzo, Matthew Faber
Country: United States
Language: English
Indie 90s: The Revolution That Changed Cinema
The ’90s didn’t just give us great movies, it changed what movies could be. Independent filmmakers that were breaking the rules, finding new voices, and reshaping American cinema.
Indie 90s features twenty-two films in all — all independent, all revolutionary.
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About the film:
An unattractive 7th grader struggles to cope with suburban life as the middle child with inattentive parents and bullies at school.
“a comedy of cringe, capturing all the discomfort and gawkiness of coming of age. Without it, there would be no other ‘special people’ films like Napoleon Dynamite or Dinner in America”
—Anton Bitel for Little White Lies
About the filmmaker:
Todd Solondz is an American filmmaker and screenwriter known for his darkly comic portraits of outsiders and suburban life. He gained international recognition with the coming-of-age film Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995). Rather than romanticizing adolescence, Solondz presents it with an unflinching mixture of satire, discomfort, and empathy. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival and established Solondz as a distinctive voice in American independent cinema.
His other films include Happiness (1998), Storytelling (2001), Palindromes (2004), Life During Wartime (2009), Dark Horse (2011), and his most recent film, the comedy anthology Wiener-Dog (2016). Across his work, Solondz continued to combine deadpan humor with uncomfortable subject matter, challenging audiences to find empathy in characters living on the margins of conventional society.
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