Girl

Girl features a teenage boy in the process of becoming a girl. She's called Lara (previously Victor) and has just moved cities along with very supportive father and much younger brother. She's been provisionally accepted into the local and very prestigious ballet school. She's taking puberty-delaying medication and will soon be old enough to take hormone replacement therapy. A raft of supportive medical professionals are accompanying Lara and her Dad on this painful journey.

It's hard to think of a more physically and emotionally demanding course of action than changing

gender while attending a ballet academy which is physically and emotionally demanding in itself. So watching the film, we're experiencing the journey even if we don't understand it.  I imagine that's how Lara's father felt - that he was experiencing the journey form the outside. Lara clearly wants to be a girl very badly and she dislikes her male body and is prepared to go to great lengths to change it. I can support that want and that aim but I don't understand it. I don't know why she feels that way, and I was hoping that Girl might give me an insight and it really didn't, so that was a bit disappointing. Perhaps it's a bit much to expect a teenager who is having hard time to articulate why they want something so badly. There are times that I want what I think being a physically imposing man would give me (especially when I'm in a business meeting) but I don't want to be a man. I'm interested in why someone would want to change sex rather than change they way they're treated, especially when transgender people aren't treated in exactly the same way as cis-gender people.

I'm digressing from the film itself which is very, very well acted and compelling. It is somewhat traumatic, and I didn't read about the self harm aspect in the NZIFF programme because Girl hadn't been rated by the censor when the paper version was printed. If I had known I may not have gone.

When I was talking to a friend about the festival and what we'd seen, he said "the best film that I saw that you probably shouldn't see because it's too upsetting was The Cleaners" And that's how I feel about Girl - a good film that you probably shouldn't see.

So no rating on this one. I could give a zero because cleaning the oven would have been more fun, but that would be denigrating the acting and the film-making in a most uncharitable way.