In the Summer of 1993, Frida, a six-year-old little girl, leaves Barcelona and her grandparents for the countryside. After her father, her mother has just died of a mysterious illness. Taken in by her uncle Esteve and aunt Marga, Frida discovers her new environment, an old stone farmhouse in a mountainous area close to a dense forest. Her new "parents" prove friendly. Another good point is that they have a three-year old daughter named Anna who can become a playmate. For another child less disturbed than miserable uprooted Frida, this would be the most idyllic of stays, in other words a permanent vacation. But Frida IS disturbed and if there are undeniably good times at her new "home", there is also the unexpressed pain which makes her both feel sad and behave badly. Will Frida overcome her troubles ? Only the end of Summer will tell.
Spring of 1992, City of Zaragoza (province of Zaragoza, autonomous community's capital of Aragón; north-east to Spain). Celia is a 11-years old girl who lives alone with her widow mother Adela. Nice and friendly, Celia's world reduces to her students in a catholic school for ladies and helping Adela with the homework as cooking and cleaning the rooms. However, her apparently peaceful world changes when to the school arrives Brisa, a new classmate from Barcelona (Catalonia's capital). Curious, restless and exciting, Brisa introduces Celia in modern music bands that she doesn't know, at the same time that Brisa befriends with another classmates as Cristina and Cristina's older sister Clara. Despite the modernity of a Spain which in that year was focus of attention by Madrid as European Cultural Capital, the Expo '92 in Seville and the Olympian Games in Barcelona, Celia lives a conservative and repressive education not only by the nuns, but a worker-class and illiterate Adela, denied to talk about Celia's father and worried about her own aging father, unable to visit him after she was banished from her natal small town to be mother not having marry before. Questioning her mother as the world she knows, Celia spends her time with the girls playing to make up, testing alcohol and smoke, dancing in the discotheques at the weekends, and learning she is despised in the school for to having father as the rest of the girls. Starting the way to be a future adult, Celia feels herself as a stranger looking for know who she is and which is her place in the world. "The Girls" is the portray of a generation as unique as the time they lived.