In narrative works, authenticity is often related to questions about who is allowed to tell the story and how they do so. In cinema, the ability to tell your own story is limited by conventions of storytelling as well as by hierarchies of power in finance and production. I suggest that adaptation can perhaps offer a pathway for female writers and directors. In this chapter, I compare two films which place an 11-year-old girl at the heart of the narrative. The Wonder (Sebastián Lelio, Netflix, 2022), the story of a religious girl’s three-month fast, is an adaptation of a novel of the same name by Emma Donoghue while Aftersun (Charlotte Wells, BBC Films/BFI, 2022), the story of a girl’s holiday with her father who no longer lives with her, can be understood as an adaptation of the director’s memory of an event in her past. I will discuss the way the films draw attention to the work of adaptation by framing the central story and leaving blanks or omissions which seem to give credibility to the claims of authenticity. In comparing these films, I will draw attention to the different ways that viewers are positioned to deal with these gaps through the processes of narration and analyse how the child’s body grounds the storytelling in dealing with what cannot be spoken. In The Wonder, the girl’s barely articulated claim to tell her own story is muted and disputed; in Aftersun, it is triumphantly asserted.