2023-06-27 13:00:28
How to explain this to a child: saints and their body parts. Lucia of Syracuse, for example, is often depicted with a plate on which two eyeballs lie. “Does she put on make-up?” asks a child whose eyes fell on Lucia while visiting church. No, says the grown-up: Lucia prayed to Saint Agathe and was punished for her belief. Strange answer. Believing, as the child now knows, is “what keeps you going.”
The relative spares the offspring and us the details: Lucia tore out her own eyes and sent them to her fiancé, whereupon Our Lady is said to have given her an even more beautiful pair. Lucia died under horrible torture, eyeballs or not.
How do you explain that to an adult: an eight-year-old boy who thinks he’s a girl. Is it because, as the strict grandmother suspects, the mother doesn’t “set boundaries” for the child? Aitor, the name of the child (played by Sofía Otero, who won the Silver Bear for the lead role), hates his name. Because it feels like a girl since early childhood. The mother Ane (Patricia López Arnaiz) allows the child to grow out its hair or go to the girls’ toilet at the swimming pool, according to the motto: “There is no such thing as girls and boys”.
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The child isn’t happy with that, it doesn’t want to be gender neutral, it wants to be a girl. As an interim solution, Aitor decides to be called “Cocó”. When visiting relatives in the mountainous Basque country, surrounded by bees, rivers and old pictures, Aitor/Cocó finally comes to the certainty that his name is “Lucía”, penis or not.
In Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren’s first feature film “20,000 species of bees“ is about transformations and revelations on both sides of borders on several levels, and it is about straightening out what is twisted and wrong. The film elegantly opens up the topic of transsexuality towards universal experiences.
What makes talking about it so difficult for many is the word itself: because the Latin “sex” means biological gender, but also means sexual intercourse in everyday life, the difference between sexual orientation and gender identity becomes blurred. Something to do with sex: Whoever bothers children with the subject, so the widespread shorthand, can only practice “early sexualization”. You have to want to know better to know better.
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To counteract his fear of bees, the great-aunt takes the child in her arms and gives him support. While the insects buzz around them, the old woman prompts: “Dear bees, we won’t hurt you”. And everything calms down: the child, the bees.
In the currently intensifying anti-trans climate, one sometimes wishes for a great aunt who says “really ruuuuhig” and just explains the facts. How: “Trans” as a prefix meaning “over” is inscribed in much that human beings do, desire and fear, from carrying burdens to crossing the final frontier of life and death. After all, we’re all a little bit trans.
The cinema tells this again and again in stories about transgender people, such as in the films Sébastien Lifshitz (‘Little Girl’, 2020, ‘Bambi’, 2013) or Monika Treuts (‘Genderation’, 1999, and ‘Gendernauts’, 2021). : They all deal with special people, but also focus on the experience that one’s own body is inhabited for a while and has to be revised again and again, because the older self is constantly saying goodbye to the younger self in the process of getting older. Leaving an entire gender identity behind is only one extreme form of a process that affects us all. And finally, this body, whatever its gender, is left behind for good.
Basque has no grammatical gender
The Basque director Solaguren succeeds in integrating the story of Aitors/Lucías into such larger contexts without overloading the fragile lightness of a childhood summer with meaning. Everything flows together as a matter of course.
Even the language: Basque and Spanish are spoken alternately in the film, sometimes the characters switch in the middle of a family conversation. An everyday fluidity surrounds these people, the mother and her three children, who drive to the country to visit their grandmother and great-aunt, where the elderly are engaged in beekeeping.
Solaguren explains that the use of Basque was also so important for the film because Basque grammar knows no gender differences and that alone has liberating potential. In the German dubbed version, this aspect is neglected. The unsettled, stable atmosphere of constant oscillating also unfolds, above all, along the central filmic motifs.
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language, gender and sex
The film is full of manufactured and abused body images. This is due to the fact that Ane is a sculptor like her deceased father: young girls once posed as models for his “Sylphs”, and apparently it didn’t just stop at that time – a dark family secret.
So Ane, who wants to apply for a teaching position, now works in her father’s workshop like an alchemist or doctor. Their fire-heated knives slice through the beeswax models of human figures like scalpels; then she has liquid metal poured into the hollow mold thus created, and later with furious force she will knock the work, which failed through impatience, out of the mold. The “right” body: a struggle.
Bees and what they create connect the spheres of art, the church (where Cocó donates a beeswax candle to Saint Lucy) and the body; in popular belief they also accompany the transitions between birth and death and resolve rigid dichotomies. The great aunt (Ane Gabarain) heals villagers from rheumatism with targeted bee stings; it is also she who explains to the child the usefulness of variance in the hive, where there are workers and guards, drones and a queen so that everyone is taken care of. When the child anxiously asks why it is “like this”, she replies: “What do you mean by that? God made us perfect.” For her, perfection is not a rigid norm, but rather recognizes difference, and does so with great friendliness.
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The child is the least happy about their “gender dysphoria,” as the medical term goes, when someone doesn’t identify with the gender they were assigned at birth. In films about transgender children, it is often the siblings who provide the necessary support, and this fraternity, even if it is only told in passing, is something of a social utopia.
Once Aitor/ Lucía asks the older brother if something went wrong with his birth. “What kind of things are you asking me,” he replies, “you’re all right.” To be able to believe in that, the human being, the social being, always needs others, and this belief helps to keep going.
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