GIRL

Director Lukas Dhont's remarkable debut film Girl was one of the prominent films at the Cannes Film Festival in 2018 - a "new filmmaker" who enters the scene with striking visual precision, a sharp thematic focus and gentle handshake with his actors.

Girl is Cannes 2018's most award-winning film with four awards for best debut film (Camera d'or), best actor in Un Certain Regard awarded to Victor Polster for the role of Lara, the International Critics Award Fipresci and Queer Palm for best film with LGBTIQA theme

In her review of Girl on Montages.no, Ida Cathrine Holme Nielsen writes in detail about how Dhont visualizes the dance, the body and the main character's inner life in the same expression:

"The ballet body acts as a kind of main theme in Girl. When 15-year-old Lara, wonderfully played by cisgender Victor Polster, is about to change her physical gender, it offers violent upheavals. She attends a renowned school for pre-professional ballet dancers and will take on a completely new role, at the same time as the physical transformation will begin. It is largely the body that is debated in masculine and feminine forms, but in the ballet sense, this is almost exclusively a clothed illusion. The gender in ballet rarely extends beyond pointe shoes and tutu. "

After the premiere and the huge success the film received, it was heavily opposed by various voices within LGBTIQA. The transgendered film critic Cathy Brennan was one of many who found the film representing transgender people in a harmful way. In a comment published on the British Film Institute's website, she wrote: "Dhont's camera dwells on the teenage Lara's crotch with a troubling fascination throughout the entire runtime. ... The camera's gaze in Girl belongs to that of a cis person. It fits comfortably into the way cis audiences see people like me. They may smile to my face while wondering what's between my legs. "