Liz Garbus is one of America's best non-fiction filmmakers, not only for television (where most of her work has aired), but for feature big screen, too. Largely through her independent documentary firm, Moxie Firecracker, Inc., successor to Firecracker Films and co-founded six years ago with director Rory Kennedy, she has built an impressive résumé. Nominated for an Oscar and Emmy and winner of two other Emmys as well as many trade, festival and media prizes, in a scant seven years Garbus has covered, and uncovered, a sweep of socially ticklish issues, including serial killing, justice and penalization, prostitution and marriage, entertainment, adolescent alienation, gun control, Third World AIDS and, most recently, questions of personal and ethnic identity in the fine Holocaust feature, The Nazi Officer's Wife.

Scheduled for theatrical and Learning Channel release this fall and next year, respectively, her latest, Girlhood, is a moving consideration that opens in an institution but widens to ghetto underbelly and poverty and finally, most importantly, maternal love and familial and communal support. Winner of awards at three festivals and official selection at four others, on screen "Girlhood" is significantly introduced as syllables on two lines, for it is indeed about two young women still only girls, and it is about the 'hood, in the sense of a community (East Baltimore City) and its mores, pitfalls and limited aspirations.

In 16 mm with a home movie look, the camera captures life at Waxter Juvenile Facility for violent offenders. Alongside ubiquitous teddy bears, empathy and love are obvious among the painfully young resident-inmates, together with jealousy and touching desire to be individually stylish within prescribed garb of blue shorts/grey sweats and white or green T-shirts. Staff and residents kid one another, and there are teachers, a nurse for headaches or aspirin, a gym that doubles as dining room and a balloon-decorated surprise birthday party.

This has become home and family for girls who have difficulties outside with parents or siblings and who have no fixed-length sentence but, instead, are counseled, evaluated and graded towards merit points for reassignment or conditional release. Initially an outgrowth from a TV shoot at an adjacent boys' facility, Girlhood acquired a life of its own in focusing on, and following, two of these girls.

Gang-raped at ten on Christmas Day and soon abusing drugs and alcohol, a year later Shanae senselessly stabbed to death a friend of the same age. While at fourteen she can describe the killing with no tears but has suffered bedtime nightmares, she is an intelligent and ambitious youngster who now does well at studies and has rapport with her parents. Megan, sixteen and abandoned by a mother (Vanessa) turned to prostitution to support a heroin addiction, has fled from eleven foster homes but landed in Waxter after cutting another child with finger rings and maybe a box cutter.

In spite of emotional and physical turmoil in their pasts, and present inner demons, they trust Garbus. Without intrusive "narrational" questioning, the two open their hearts and lives, with the common line of relationships -- of aching love and of rejection -- to their mothers. Tony Hardmon's camera avoids   talking head-itis to follow real events, not self-conscious on-stage acts, into evaluation sessions with unit directors and psychologists, classes, other institutions like Florence Crittenton Group Home, home visits and foster homes, street and family life, success and failure.

Both return to the world outside, and one wonders if perhaps a number of stories were filmed and these particular two chosen for ending poles apart. Shanae's mother Antoinette Owens dies shortly, at thirty-four of diabetes-related heart complications, but the only child graduates number four in her high school class and plans to major in psychology at a community college. Radiant and dressed up, to family and neighbors' applause and tears, she steps into a limo for the prom. A small start, but true.

A stay with grandmother Lorraine and mother, a Mrs. Harris' twelfth foster home, a period with cousin Trina and then friend Jersey, a place of her own (but no job), some hanging out, then Megan is back in the institution -- "I swear nobody loves me" -- but not before a searing cri de coeur that any professional actress would give her eye teeth even to approach. "I'm taking back my heart," she raps at the end, for "love's lost in the dark."

In the past decade, the number of such girls convicted of violent crimes has doubled. And one must ask, where have we gone wrong? 

(Released by Moxie Firecracker, Inc.; not rated by MPAA.)