Filmmaker Karen Maine grew up in the 1990s in a Catholic community in Iowa, where her high school sex education was a video of a late-term abortion and an abstinence-only talk by Pam Stenzel. Her autobiographical short film, “Yes, God, Yes,” gives us a glimpse into a young woman’s coming of age, described by The Guardian as, “…a snappy, hilarious and frank portrayal of a teenage girl discovering masturbation and sexuality in an unnamed Midwestern Catholic community in the late 90s, when the internet suddenly arrived in people’s homes, presenting a mystifying world of possibility.”
Starring Natalia Dyer of Stranger Things as Alice, this is the second film by Maine to address taboo sexual topics. The first was 2014’s Obvious Child, which depicted abortion. Maine tells The Guardian, “these are stories that happen to lots of women, and they can be realistic and funny, and they don’t have to be serious and gross and, like, gasp-worthy.”
