Directed by Leontine Sagan and based on a stage play by Christa Winsloe, Girls in Uniform, with its all-female cast and provocative subject matter, has always been a somewhat controversial film, open to several different readings, including as a proto-feminist and lesbian work. Centered around an emotionally fragile girl who attends a repressive, rigidly-run boarding school for the daughters of the military upper class, the film is undeniably anti-authoritarian in its politics. Sagan juxtaposes the cruelty of the staff and coldness of the institutional surroundings with the warm friendships between the teenage students who, in a clear case of youth triumphing over the repressive “old” ways, rally around their weakest member in defiance of the staff.