127 min | NR | June 14, 2024 | Film Movement
An eight-year-old assigned male at birth spends a summer at the family home in the Basque Country, certain she is a girl the adults insist she is not. The mother is breaking apart, the great-aunt tends her bees, and the kid just wants a name that fits. The film knows exactly how patient it can afford to be.
Lucía is eight years old. The adults call her Aitor and treat her name as a phase to be managed. Over one summer at the family house in the Basque Country, she sits with the question of who she is while the grown-ups argue about who she is allowed to be. The film is not about transition as event. It is about a child waiting for the people who love her to catch up to what she already knows.
Sofía Otero carries the film as Lucía with a stillness that never reads as performance. She watches the adults negotiate her existence and lets the hurt register in small adjustments of the face. Patricia López Arnaiz plays Ane, the mother, as a woman drowning in her own unfinished business and unable to give her child the certainty she lacks herself. Ane Gabarain plays the great-aunt Lourdes, the beekeeper, who offers Lucía the one space where no one demands she be someone else. Itziar Lazkano plays the grandmother Lita with the rigidity of a generation that has no language for any of this.
Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren writes and directs her first feature with a refusal to dramatize. She shoots the bee colonies and the smoke of the apiary in long, attentive takes that mirror Lucía’s own watchfulness. The hive becomes the film’s organizing image without ever being explained aloud. The natural light and the close framing on children’s faces keep the camera at Lucía’s height, so the adult conflicts arrive the way they reach a child. Half-heard. Looming. Out of her control.
This is a film that trusts a child to hold the center and trusts the audience to sit in the discomfort of the adults getting it wrong. Lucía is never the problem to be solved. The problem is everyone around her. Urresola Solaguren builds the whole thing around a question of naming and has the discipline to let the answer arrive quietly, on the child’s terms, in the child’s time.