XXY

Alex is fifteen and was born intersex. Her parents moved from Buenos Aires to an isolated house on the Uruguayan coast, where nobody knows. Her father is a marine biologist working with turtles. One day a family arrives from Argentina: the father is a surgeon and he has a sixteen-year-old son. The subject is not the body but the pressure to decide. Alex has stopped taking her medication and everyone expects her to choose a side; her mother consults the surgeon, her father wants to postpone, and Alex asks the question neither of them asks: what if I am nothing? The form is cold and windswept: sand, a steel-grey sea, a wooden house. The dialogue is short and most things are left unsaid. It is Lucía Puenzo's first feature, written from a story by Sergio Bizzio. It won the Grand Prize of Critics' Week at Cannes in 2007 and took the Goya for best foreign film in Spanish. The production is counted among the early films to put an intersex character in the lead and present them as a person rather than a problem. Inés Efrón plays Alex and Ricardo Darín her father. Who it is for: viewers who like quiet Latin American drama and coming-of-age stories. Who it is not for: anyone who does not want to be caught unprepared by a scene of sexual violence; the film enters a hard passage midway.