How to Have Sex 2023

Molly Manning Walker will be in attendance for a Q+A following screenings in Auckland and Wellington.

“The setting is the Greek town of Malia, where three teenage girls—Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), her sister Skye (Lara Peake) and their friend Em (Enva Lewis)—are taking their first unaccompanied holiday abroad while awaiting their exam results.

Em is a straight-A student, but Tara and Sky aren’t, and they don’t seem to care too much. The focus of the trip is to have sex, and Tara bears a particular burden, being the only virgin of the trio. At the hotel resort, Tara strikes up a friendship with their neighbor, the funny, flirtatious, self-deprecating northerner Badger (Shaun Thomas), but soon finds herself drawn to his best friend Paddy (Sam Bottomley), a much more sharp and cynical player...

Molly Manning Walker’s film is precisely about the fact that Tara looks, and believes herself to be, older than she is. The dominant theme here is the rub between self-image and reality; everyone here, in a world without any adjacent adults and in true teenage fashion, feels themselves to be older and wiser than they really are, and the drama comes entirely from the tensions that arise whenever reality becomes too real to ignore.

Thankfully, there is more than a suggestion of hope here, and the supporting cast make what for anyone over 30 would be the holiday from hell into something surprisingly relatable and really quite moving.” —Damon Wise, Deadline

“How to Have Sex is equally likely to endure comparisons to Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun (NZIFF 2022), last year’s great British debut about regimented package-tour fun bringing out the latent melancholy of troubled holidaymakers.” — Guy Lodge, Variety