Brave – and necessary. Solaguren – who also wrote the script for 20,000 Species of Bees – was inspired by the suicide of a 16-year-old trans boy Ekai Lersundi in 2018.
Here, we find a family that lives in the French Basque Country. The parents are on the cusp of splitting up and of the children (teenage Nerea, 10-year-old Eneko and eight-year-old Aitor) the boys seem to constantly fight, while Aitor – also known as the less gender specific Cocó – is clearly unhappy and constantly acting up.
Their mother Ane takes the children with her for an extended summer holiday in the Basque Country south of the Pyrenees, where they will stay with her mother, Lita. Gorka, their father, stays at home.
Ane has allowed Cocó to wear their hair long and use blue nail polish, and they are quietly pleased when the local old ladies congratulate Lita on having a lovely granddaughter, but the conservatively religious grandmother nags her daughter to go to a hairdresser and get Cocó a “boy cut”.
Wary of local children, Cocó increasingly spends their days with Aunt Lourdes – a local ‘wise’ women, who lives alone, keeps bees and uses them to cure neighbours of a variety of ailments. There, they start to open up, often describing themselves (unprompted) as behaving like a girl.
They question what went “wrong” with them in their mother’s womb and why they are “like this”.
But Lita is becoming more strident in her approach, trotting out tired clichés about Ane having over-indulged the child, and the great patriarchal one that the problem is that Cocó is surrounded by women (which doesn’t seem to have changed Eneko’s gender identity).
Ane is confused about the issue – but also hits back at her mother, who had done nothing to tackle a dirty little family secret about her late husband, a sculptor.
Cocó prays to become Lucía – and even asks her aunt if she can’t die and come back as a girl.
Essentially an all-female ensemble piece – it won an award for the best female ensemble cast at the Guadalajara International Film Festival – it’s moving, yet never mawkish or sentimental, and is tackled with great sensitivity and humanity.
To help ensure accuracy, Naizen, a regional association for the families of transgender children, worked with Solaguren and provided guidance for Sofía Otero, who plays Lucía.
Otero carries the film on her eight-year-old shoulders – a simply outstanding performance that saw her become the youngest ever winner of the Silver Bear for best leading performance at the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival in February, just one of many awards that the piece has already garnered. In September, it was put forward for nomination for next year’s Academy Awards.
Patricia López Arnaiz as Ane and Ane Gabarain as Lourdes also turn in superb performances, while Gina Ferrer García’s cinematography is top notch.
If you can, do see it. It’s also on Curzon Home Cinema now. It is a film that will stay with you a very long time.
As Solaguren put it in an interview: "The girl does not transform. Throughout the film, she acquires the tools to express who she is. What is transformed is the family."
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