My Year of Dicks was recently nominated for Best Animated Short Film at the Academy Awards. FF2 Media is proud to support such an innovative woman-led project. Learn more about FF2 Contributor Farah Elattar’s screening and Q&A experience below and cheer on My Year of Dicks at the 95th Academy Awards Ceremony on Sunday, March 12th, 2023.
My year began on a fresh note with a screening of My Year Of Dicks in Los Angeles on January 5th. As I attended the event – my first ever of the sort in LA since moving to the city in late 2022 – I was amazed (and, admittedly, a bit starstruck) at the assembly of clearly influential people that came to see the film.
The screening was hosted by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who produced the Academy Award-winning Spider-Man: Into the SpiderVerse. It was then followed by an insightful Q&A with director Sara Gunnarsdóttir (The Diary of a Teenage Girl, The Case Against Adnan Sayed), writer Pamela Ribon (Ralph Breaks The Internet, Moana), and producer Jennette Jeanenne (Drone, Woman in the Book). After seeing the film and listening to its creators, I am not surprised that the event was full of people eager to attend and support it.
My Year Of Dicks is an animated short film that tells the story of a young Pam who desperately tries to lose her virginity at 15. Based on Pamela Ribon’s 2017 memoir Notes To Boys, the film follows Pam’s story through different encounters with “dicks,” referring here to the variety of men that try to sleep with her throughout the film.
The film time-hops to each encounter, which is given its own chapter and graphic style – breaking traditional animation and narrative methods, which often stick to one genre and a continual linear storyline.
The film time-hops to each encounter, which is given its own chapter and graphic style – breaking traditional animation and narrative methods, which often stick to one genre and a continual linear storyline. This choice serves both to convey Pam’s shifting mindset throughout her journey, and to highlight the different personas (real or idealized) that these men represent to her 15-year-old self, as well as her ultimate disappointment when they do not live up to the hype.
Chapter Two, my personal favorite of the five, is titled “Un Gros Penis.” It pays comic homage to the French New Wave, beginning with Pam watching a very erotic French film, and then following her and her friends to their local movie theater where her crush works. The film plays on stylistic choices often found in New Wave films, with close-up shots of Pam’s eyes and lips intertwined almost disjointedly with the surrounding environment.
The chapter even features Pam doing a voiceover in a French accent over imagined scenes of her and her supposedly French lover finally being together. This highlights the many hopes and expectations that Pam (and a lot of teenage girls on this very journey) places on *the moment* she finally manages to lose her virginity.
Her fantasy is swiftly brought back to reality as the rose-colored glasses are lifted and she realizes the theater attendant she was idealizing was in fact just a “dick” who wanted to sleep with her, and not her desired mysterious French lover. The cycle of high hopes and letdowns happens to Pam various times throughout the film as she comes of age and learns to sharpen her idiot-dar and to stay away from “dicks.”
Despite the elaborateness of the animation and the environment surrounding her, the audience still finds itself drawn to Pam – putting her at the center of the narrative, and ensuring it is not taken over by those of the men surrounding her.
The creators ground the film by including shots from Pamela Ribon’s 1997 self-shot home videos of her working on a high school assignment and using rotoscope animation to seamlessly transition into the next chapter. Despite the elaborateness of the animation and the environment surrounding her, the audience still finds itself drawn to Pam – putting her at the center of the narrative, and ensuring it is not taken over by those of the men surrounding her.
The film shows the viewer Pam’s gaze without telling it, which is often a sign of a great work. The creators do a wonderful job of grounding the film and focusing on Pam. Her thoughts, feelings, and inner emotions are centered as she puts herself in various situations to meet different men and processes her experiences.
As Pamela put it in the Q&A, this film was made to highlight the intense, confusing, exciting, and disappointing thoughts that go through a teenage girl’s head as she navigates the vulnerable journey to losing her virginity – a journey often kept private and considered too taboo to discuss comfortably.
Pamela herself mentioned the supportive but multi-layered relationship her real-life family has to her work, which often exposes parts of life that people avoid bringing up. The intentionality behind her storytelling serves to make the world a bit more comfortable for women to exist, to be seen, and to bring to the table narratives that are often untouched or brushed over in the mainstream.
Overall, My Year Of Dicks is a refreshing take on the adolescent girl’s experience of sex and sexuality. The movie’s take on the topic is emblematic of its creators: it is powerful and eloquent, but does not take itself too seriously.
© Farah Elattar (1/29/23) FF2 Media®
LEARN MORE
Watch My Year Of Dicks here (for a limited time).
Find Pamela Ribon’s memoir, Notes to Boys: And Other Things I Shouldn’t Share in Public here.
Learn more about Sara Gunnarsdóttir here.
Find other works produced by Jeanette Jeannene and GLAS Animation here.
CREDITS & PERMISSIONS
Featured photo: My Year of Dicks Q&A. Photo courtesy of Farah Elattar at the My Year Of Dicks screening.
