Growing Pains Premiere | Saturday, May 18, 6:45 p.m. | The Rialto Theater, Raleigh
As an undergraduate at NC State University in 2021, Mariana Fabian published an opinion piece in the Technician, the student newspaper, critiquing the dialogue of the young people in the Amazon Prime series The Wilds.
That piece would lead to Fabian working as a co-writer and associate producer on a full-length independent feature film, Growing Pains, that premieres at the Rialto Theater in Raleigh this month.
“The writing process was very rewarding and gratifying,” says Fabian, a former INDY intern who goes by Mari. “I had had some screenwriting experience [in college] when I took a screenwriting class, but I’d never had this opportunity in front of me where it was like, ‘Oh, I can write a story about my life if I want to.’”
Growing Pains follows childhood best friends Nat and Zoe as they navigate the transition from middle school to high school and slowly drift apart. The characters are loosely based on the respective experiences that Fabian and Catherine Argyrople, the film’s writer, director, and producer, had while growing up in North Carolina and Massachusetts.
Argyrople was living in Boston and in the early stages of coming up with a concept for Growing Pains when she reached out to Fabian with a cold email.
“I knew I wanted to tell an authentic story about teen girls or young women going through really diverse life experiences, but in the same town, and I was looking for a writing partner,” Argyrople explains. She says Fabian’s piece on The Wilds hit on “exactly what I was looking for in terms of what I was researching with female-centered storytelling and writing … and an authentic lens.”
The film, set in New England, draws on the life experiences of both women, Argyrople as a childhood cancer survivor and Fabian, who grew up queer in a Hispanic household. It takes inspiration from women-centered coming-of-age films such as Ladybird, Pariah, Booksmart, and for Fabian, The Miseducation of Cameron Post and The Watermelon Woman, Cheryl Dunye’s 1996 romantic comedy-drama about a young, Black lesbian who wants to make a film about Fae Richards, a 1930s actress known for portraying “mammy” roles.
“After I watched The Watermelon Woman in my Queer Cinema class, I knew writing lesbian and female centered stories was for me,” Fabian says.
The character Nat draws on Fabian’s background, and Fabian says that in working on the script, it was important to her to represent a Hispanic family accurately.
“All of the cast members that are in Nat’s family are Hispanic, and they speak Spanish,” Fabian says. “Throughout these scenes where Nat is talking with her family, [talking] about her identity—there are these really sweet moments where they’re making food together—there are subtitles, which is just something I was committed to from the beginning. And, thankfully, Catherine and I were able to make it work.”
Argyrople, a graduate of Northeastern University, launched a production company, Catalyze Her, and built a team to make Growing Pains. The film, shot in Boston over 21 days in the summer of 2022, was financed through crowdfunding. The cast—including its lead actors Deanna Tarraza, who plays Nat, and Molly Morneweck, who portrays Zoe—all came from the Boston area. The 110-person team included a 25-person crew and dozens of extras.
“It’s a pretty large-scale indie film, even though it was like a microbudget feature,” Argyrople says.
The film wrapped post-production in the fall of 2023 and premiered at the Chelsea Film Festival in New York City and the Boston International Film Festival last year. It has won acclaim from critics and received the prestigious ReFrame Stamp from the Sundance Institute and Women in Film for gender-balanced hiring.
Having women both in front of and behind the camera is critical to Catalyze Her’s mission.
“We were really cognizant of telling this as a female-centered story,” Argyrople says.
For all the work they did together, Fabian and Argyrople never met one another in person until the Boston premiere last April. They’ll reunite in Raleigh at the film’s premiere at the Rialto on May 18, where, following the film, they’ll participate in a panel with representatives from the local LGBT community, including Kori Hennessey from the LGBT Center of Raleigh, Amanda Cottrill from Wake Forest Pride, and Holly Atkins, the founder of Hope for Teens, which hosts the Triangle’s annual Queer Prom.
Argyrople is currently working on her second feature film, The Ocean Calls Me, a coming-of-age surfing drama set in Florida in the 1970s. She says she plans to continue to make films and work through her production company.
“It’s definitely a challenging time to be an independent filmmaker, but I’m so grateful I get to tell stories for a living. It’s such a joy,” Argyrople says.
Fabian, who is finishing up a graduate degree at UNC-Chapel Hill in library science, says she is still figuring out what’s next, whether that’s a career as a librarian or archivist, or something else entirely.
But she says she plans to keep writing, creating, and telling stories that bring hope to others.
“Having hope, radical empathy, in this moment is very important … and that intersects exactly with what our film is trying to do,” Fabian says. “So, post the premiere, I hope to keep bringing that kind of joy to whatever kind of field I end up in.”
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