“Summer 2000: The X-Cetra Story” won the SXSW Jury Award for Best Documentary Feature at SXSW 2026. Directed by Ayden Mayeri, it’s the story of a quartet of childhood friends who made a record when they were junior high school age (11 to 13) and it surfaced as a hit on the website Rate Your Music 24 years later. Said Director Mayeri, “This album being discovered is the weirdest thing that has ever happened to me.
The X-Cetra Story (Photo by Dessie Jackson).
”WRITER/DIRECTOR
Director Ayden Mayeri, who has 58 IMDB credits, has appeared in such films as Paul Feig’s “Jackpot!”, “Mr.Throwback,” “Cora Bora Comedy,” “Spin Me Around,” and is the Writer/Director of this award-winning documentary. After the unexpected fame of their album Et-Cetra, (made in 2000), Mayeri decided to try to get the foursome together again, twenty-four years later. Ayden admitted “I really missed hanging out with them and being carefree. She likened their reunion in Santa Rosa as “Our version of Backstreet’s Back.”
Ayden Mayeri
Ayden admitted that she wanted to recapture the unself-conscious feeling of her pre-teen years. It is captured via extensive videotaping by one of the girl’s mothers from back when the girls were 11 to 13, in 2000. Kudos to Editor Phil Rosanova and Audrey Leach, who drew the task of blending copious amounts of film and to cinematographer Barry Rothbart. The musician mother Robin O’Brien who had ties to the German music provider Akim and produced the girls’ maiden vocal efforts deserves much credit for the album existing at all, also.
Now 36, Mayeri described the era to The Daily Texan as “a journey of me trying to fit in.” She said, “It’s just me and my friends, living our childhood dream, putting our vision out in the world… It was crazy because we made this album in the year 2000 when we were 10 to 12 years old … we were immediately very embarrassed about it. We were like, “Let’s never talk about that again. We’re in junior high. Everything’s embarrassing. (We) don’t want anyone to know we did that.”
CAST
X-Cetra cast
Following “Rolling Stone’s” writing an article on their X-Cetra album of the early 2000s, the quartet of old friends gather in Santa Rosa and even write some new music. The film became a thumbnail character sketch of each of the four girls: Jessica Hall, Janet Kariuki, Mary Washburn and Ayden herself. The intervening years for each girl are related in a way that makes us care about them, especially since we’ve seen them when they were adolescents perched on the verge of high school.
EDGE OF INNOCENCE
The universal truth for all girls that comes throughis that dating and boys and being “cool” will change the relationships between these girls that formed earlier. The self-consciousness of youth will sometimes inhibit even those who are obviously talented at a young age. One of the reasons Ayden gave for making the documentary was this: “I think my greatest dream is that people feel free to be creative for no reason and to really go back and tell their younger selves that they’re great … I really wanted to show what girlhood feels like, and that’s why I’m reading from my diaries, and we’re talking about some kind of messed up stuff, because that’s girlhood”
X-Cetra cast
It was clear early on that Ayden was innately talented. But, as a lyric sung in the documentary asks, “Did I make you feel embarrassed when I’m something to be cherished?” This film allowed the four fast friends of 2000 to revisit and recapture the exuberance of their youth, via X-Cetra.
Jessica, for instance, shares that boys of their class harassed her with the nickname “titless” for a long time, while Mary—the youngest at eleven—was excluded from the group as high school approached because the other three were two years older. Brushes with parental divorce, drugs, relationships gone wrong—all are included and fill in the picture of who these four girls are and who they were in 2000 before life intervened.
DOCUMENTARY RESONATES
X-Cetra cast
The documentary struck a chord with the audience, which voted it the winner of the Audience Award at SXSW 2026. It resonated with me, as I taught junior high school students for eighteen years. I remember my own daughter’s early friendships and creativity when exactly the same age as these girls in 2000. The line, “Are you gonna’ live in that moment for the rest of your life?” was a good one, highlighting that the lives of the foursome have moved in separate directions.
Thanks to the parents who both filmed and recorded the girls at a young age, we can see the arc of their lives from 2000 to 2026. I’m sure their reunion to celebrate the unexpected success of X-Cetra the album was a great one.
This SXSW documentary was a joy for the original members of X-Cetra and it is a joy for the audience.
