Here’s a lovely film to watch today, on International Transgender Day of Visibility. In the 2020 French verité documentary Little Girl (Petite Fille), we meet eight-year-old Sasha, who was born into a boy’s body, but as soon as she was able to articulate such notions — from the age of two-and-a-half or three, her mother says — she insisted she was a girl. Her family is absolutely fine with Sasha being her own unique Sasha. The rest of the world? Not so much. From my review:
[T]here is nothing like a child’s pain to radicalize a parent, and Mom goes full tiger in trying to get Sasha’s school to treat her as a girl. That is the small yet huge arc of this honest, intimate film, Mom’s fight to have the world see Sasha as her mother does, and as Sasha see herself. If it didn’t say “male” on a piece of paper, Mom says about the school’s stubborn insistence that Sasha is a boy, no one would know otherwise. Why should it matter?
This is an inspiring portrait of someone asking for so little: to be accepted for who she is. It’s not a lot to ask, and we should all be able to accommodate her.
US: stream on Kanopy and Mubi (via Prime); rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV
UK: stream Mubi (via Prime); rent on Curzon Home Cinema; rent/buy on Prime and Apple TV
See Little Girl at Letterboxd for more viewing options.
