The sport of wrestling is ancient and international: it is depicted in ancient cave paintings, Egyptian tombs, and Etruscan pottery. It’s native not only to ancient Greece and Rome, but also to India, Africa, Asia, Europe and the Americas. The wrestling instinct is seen in puppies, bears, and beyond; wrestling may be the only sport that’s hardwired into humans besides running. But patriarchal human cultures have insisted it’s a man’s sport, and have excluded women from wrestling. Recently, this has started to change: Participation among high-school girls in the USA has grown by 500% in a decade: from 13,500 in 2016, to 74,000 in 2025. In Nebraska, where our documentary is set, girls’ wrestling has grown nearly thirty-fold (3000%) in just five years (2021-26).
SHE WRESTLES explores why this ancient sport has become so meaningful, so quickly, to so many young women. SHE WRESTLES is a portrait of a movement, of a cultural change, and of contemporary adolescence. We achieve this by interweaving multiple character arcs with a chorus of voices drawn from 100+ audio interviews. This vocal chorus helps identify and represent patterns of experience, and it grants anonymity to wrestlers whose sensitive stories could make them vulnerable. The film briskly takes us from one place to another, achieving startling intimacy with a wide range of teams, wrestlers, and communities. SHE WRESTLES thus movingly, poetically documents how this social movement and cultural change are transformative and empowering for young women in the American heartland, which is a microcosm of the greater US, and many parts of the world.
From the beginning, I knew this film would be about wrestling, empowerment, and gender. Over five years of filming, interviewing, editing and making sense of our material, I’ve come to realize that it also powerfully documents adolescence in our turbulent times: what it means to come-of-age in this chaotic, often unwelcoming world; how we find peace and meaning in the struggle.
