20,000 Species of Bees (12A)
Directed by Urresola Solaguren
 

THIS is an impressive debut from Urresola Solguren. 

She tackles the tricky subject of gender identity with skill and sensitivity, helped by strong performances from Sofia Otero as Aitor/Cocoo/Lucia, Patricia Lopez Arnaiz as sculptor and mother Ane, and Ane Gaberain as grandmother Lourdes. 

Otero won the Silver Bear for Best Leading Performance at the Berlin Film Festival, the first child actor to do so.

The film comments throughout on borders, mirrors/glass, lines and boundaries and on what is noticed and what is not. Lourdes seeing that Coco (the indeterminate name Aitor goes by throughout much of the first two thirds of the film) wants to become Lucia is a mirror for her not noticing that her artist husband was causing a scandal when photographing the town’s young girls years earlier, and the problems it caused for Ane.

The film begins with the crossing of a border, from Bayonne where Ane lives with her husband and three children, to her mother’s house in Laudio/Llodia in the Spanish Basque country. We see Coco looking through back windows and into mirrors throughout. 

Ane’s sculpting parallels her father’s historically, and Coco’s attempted self-construction in the present. The past/the present and the male and the female are placed next to each other, sometimes in opposition, sometimes blurring. 

Then, there are the bees. The hives are where Coco seems most at ease, and where Lourdes and he bond (I am using the male pronoun as that is what the film does until the final section). As there are many types of bees, so there are many types of boys and girls. 

After spending time with Coco at the hives, it is Lourdes who encourages Ane to let him be treated as a girl. 

Ane’s view throughout the film has been that “there’s no girls’ or boys’ stuff”. She has attempted to teach her children that they can be whatever they want while remaining within their observed sex but that is not enough for Coco, who wonders if “something went wrong in the womb.”

Things come to a head in the final 20 minutes, when Ane decides to let Coco wear a dress to a family christening. I’ll avoid plot spoilers and simply say that the question of proper nouns is key to the film’s denouement.

The film manages to do something very well: to avoid the debates around sex and gender by focusing on the human and the concrete reality of the topic for one family.

Out in cinemas on Friday