News@FMUL invited Dr. António Pais de Lacerda*, an “expert” in films related to medicine, to contribute with some movie suggestions for its readers. In addition to being the founder and president of MedCine Film Festival (Cascais, 2009), this FMUL lecturer has developed and maintains an updated lists of this type of movies that is given to students in Module III-I, in the first year of the Integrated Master Degree in Medicine.

News@FMUL thanks him for his precious support to medical culture and the “seventh art”.

Tomboy by Céline Sciamma (2011) 

Lisa: (…) Are you new around here?
Laure: Yeah, we got in yesterday.
Lisa: I’m Lisa. I live here. [pause] You’re shy.
Laure: No, I’m not.
Lisa: Won’t you tell me your name?
Laure: Mikael, my name is Mikael.

Zoé Héran (awarded “Best Actress” in the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema, 2012) gives a surprising portrayal of Laure, a ten-year-old cropped-hair girl in baggy clothes living with her younger sister, Jeanne (Malonn Lévana), who loves dolls and dressing up in a ballet tutu, her daddy (Mathieu Demy), constantly absorbed in his work, and her mummy (Sophie Cattani) who is pregnant again. One (unforgettable) summer, she meets Lisa, (Jeanne Disson), and the other children in the building to which she has recently moved, and introduces herself as Mikael, who “feels” and “wants to be seen by everyone” and him/herself as the boy he “really is!” When we, the viewers, come to realise (only after the first fifteen minutes of the film), the true biological sexual identity of Laure, we become privy to the emotions and disturbances involved in the desire to live as an “infiltrator” in “another” world, characterised by “ways of being masculine”. However, the more intimate details of a “wrongly female” born body are never disclosed. The consciousness-raising process is under way: the rejection of femininity and adoption of masculinity.

Céline Sciamma, a young, formal, minimalist French film director, is author and director of a sensitive and disturbing film which raises issues on child sexuality and identity definition, in a world where the phenotype apparently dictates behaviour. However, her intention is not to explain – she merely sets out to lightly touch on her own childhood, particularly her relationship with her sister; the rest is just about feelings. She says that at the time of her own childhood, there was not much room for “failed boys”, since “cropped hair for girls was not a fashion”. The word “Tomboy” was coined in the sixteenth century, a derogatory term to refer to girls who behaved uncouthly, thus, likened to “Toms”, a common masculine name at that time.

Zoé Héran appeared on the first day of auditions and was immediately considered the best candidate – perfect attitudes and a football lover. Choosing the other children was then a simple task: her actual friends with whom she played football in real life.

Shot over a period of just 20 days in August 2010, Tomboy won “Best Film” awards in the International Gay & Lesbian Festivals in Turin, Philadelphia (Jury Award) and San Francisco (Viewers Choice Award) and the Teddy Jury Award in the Berlin International Film Festival, 2011. It was noted for its singular depiction of truth and simplicity across the various stages of innocence and companionship, and for managing to transport so much of what is perceived as being “wrong”, hence demanding “eradication”, to the surface of the mind, without being condemnatory or judgemental. Tomboy draws attention to a reality: one does not choose one’s own biological gender: it is a genetic product, continuously constructed by each individual on the basis of a biological structure and psychological development, and is impacted by an array of social and behavioural influences, educational transitions, role-model imitation and everything that surrounds one’s psycho-somatic development. This film focuses on a gender dysphoria situation, which is always extremely dramatic for the individual who carries the burden of a heavy penalisation in social, educational and even professional terms. The personal side to the issue is characterised by a clear distinction between the gender that is felt, expressed and experienced by the individual, and the “birth” gender, by which the child is classified by others (during a period of at least 6 months). Children should be able to verbalise the desire to “belong to the other gender”. Replacing the previous terminology used for such situations (“Gender Identity Disorder”) with the more recent expression “Gender Dysphoria” has removed the pathological psychiatric “disorder” stigma, clearly separating the condition from Sexual Dysfunction and Paraphilia. Tomboy was one of the selected films to be viewed and discussed by secondary-school pupils in France, within the scope of the joint programme between the Ministries of National Education and Culture to raise awareness of the Seventh Art. A follow-up activity to the film addressed gender-related issues and led to a short assignment from the pupils on the topic. However, the programming of such activities triggered widespread protest in late 2013 (a year after the film had been under discussion), and gave rise to a petition, appealing to a “Christian conception of the individual”, in order to ban the viewing of this film. Despite such long-lasting controversy, the film is not expected to be withdrawn from the French school programme “École et Cinéma”.

In fact, Tomboy is a visually beautiful film which looks at the world through the eyes of children (the light Canon 7D camera takes low angle shots) and makes one feel the pain of “difference”, of “feeling out of place in one’s own body”- a discrepancy that should not have to be noted, contradicted or even reproached.

Through this film one painfully learns about experiencing risks and accepting a reality in a cruel world where commitments have to be established, but where love and acceptance may also be found.

trailer | video and photos

* Assistant Lecturer of the Subjects of Module III-I “Clinical Medicine – The Physician, the Person, and the Patient” and of Intensive Medicine at FMUL.