Descriptions:
In 1975, Argentina’s legal framework gave the state the power to determine the sex of intersex children at birth. By 2007, Lucía Puenzo had turned that legal machinery into cinema.
XXY opens on the coast of Uruguay — a family in exile from Buenos Aires, where the gossip had followed them. Their fifteen-year-old, Alex (Inés Efron), is intersex. The parents (Ricardo Darín, Valeria Bertuccelli) have spent years delaying the surgery that would “correct” Alex’s body. When a plastic surgeon and his family arrive as houseguests — including his teenage son Álvaro — the fragile silence breaks open.
What Puenzo built was not a case study. It was the first major film from the Global South to place an intersex person at the centre of the frame — not as a condition to be managed, but as a life to be witnessed. Alex does not ask to be fixed. The film does.
XXY won the Critics’ Week Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival 2007. It remains one of the most significant and least-screened intersex films to emerge from Latin America — a fact that tells you something about which stories the industry considers worth preserving.
⟶ Director: Lucía Puenzo
⟶ Starring: Inés Efron, Ricardo Darín, Martín Piroyansky, Valeria Bertuccelli
⟶ Country: Argentina / France / Spain (2007)
⟶ Award: Critics’ Week Grand Prix, Cannes Film Festival 2007
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