Girl

Lara is fifteen, a trans girl, and wants to train as a classical ballet dancer. Her family supports her: her father is beside her at every step, the school accepted her, the doctors are running the process. So the conflict is not outside but in Lara's relation to her own body. The ballet passages are therefore central: standing on pointe, watching herself in a mirror, measuring and correcting the body continually. The film lays the two over each other. Lukas Dhont wrote it from the life of Nora Monsecour, whom he read about in a Belgian newspaper in 2009; Monsecour contributed throughout the production. It took four prizes in Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2018: FIPRESCI, the Queer Palm, the Caméra d'Or for a first feature and the performance award for Victor Polster. It was also sharply criticised. Polster is not trans, which was the first objection from trans critics. The second and larger argument concerns a scene near the end; Monsecour later said it had no counterpart in her own life. Before you watch, know this: the film contains violence toward the body, and that scene was considered harmful by many trans viewers. Watching it without knowing this argument makes its present standing hard to understand.