Documentary 'The Debutantes' shines a light on cotillions as a celebration of Black Girlhood

Isabel Yip is an intern for NBC News.

Debutante balls have traditionally been associated with a particular kind of coming of age: that of teen girls who are well-to-do and, for the most part, white. A newly revived Black debutante ball in Canton, Ohio, uses the cotillion experience as programming for Black girls, many of whom live below the poverty line.

These “dreamscape worlds,” as Gayles described them, serve as the backdrop in the film for the debutantes’ existential contemplations of what it means to be a Black girl and a Black woman. In “The Debutantes,” Gayles said she incorporated archival footage to stage an “intergenerational dialogue between the older generation and the current generation of Gen Z girls.” As the film opens, black-and-white archival footage rolls of young Black girls in the 1970s, curtseying before society.

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