How to Have Sex

Molly Manning Walker's How to Have Sex won the Un Certain Regard Prize at Cannes 2023 and the BAFTA for Outstanding Debut by a British Writer/Director in 2024. The film consolidated Manning Walker, then twenty-nine, as one of the most distinctive new British directorial voices of her generation. Mia McKenna-Bruce, in the central role, won the BAFTA Rising Star Award the same year.

Three British teenage girls (Tara (McKenna-Bruce), Em (Enva Lewis), and Skye (Lara Peake)) arrive in Malia, Crete, for the rite-of-passage Greek island holiday: fluorescent-lit clubs, cheap spirits, performative hedonism, and the unspoken expectation among the friends that this is when the supposedly-experienced one will catch up on the experiences her friends believe they have. The film follows the holiday across what is broadly a single week, with a deepening attention to the social pressures around teenage female sexuality that the holiday's ostensible permissive register actually produces.

The film operates simultaneously as character study, social-realist document of contemporary British teenage culture, and quietly devastating examination of consent. Nicolas Canniccioni's photography of Malia hotel-strip exteriors and the long late-night club sequences, Manning Walker's screenplay-and-direction commitment to McKenna-Bruce's central performance, and the careful pacing across the holiday's days combine into one of the most affecting British debut features of recent years. Manning Walker had previously been a cinematographer (Scrapper) before this directorial debut.