For her debut feature as a director, Lucia Puenzo created this sensitive tale of an intersex 15-year-old dealing with parental expectations, social pressure and emotional conflict. Alex (Ines Efron) was born with both male and female sex organs. Her family has moved her to a remote fishing village in Uruguay to escape bullying while having her take hormones to suppress her male features. When her mother (Valeria Bertuccelli) invites her best friend's family to visit, she has an ulterior motive. Her friend's husband is a surgeon, and Bertuccelli hopes he will perform surgery to permanently suppress Alex's male side. However, Alex has secretly stopped taking her medication to explore their non-binary status. When the surgeon's son, Alvaro (Martin Piroyansky) finds himself attracted to Alex's male side, both families have to deal with their children's sexual identities.

Puenzo, a native of Argentina, has focused on childhood and adolescent issues related to gender in most of her films, coming down firmly against heteronormative views of child development. Yet her films are far from didactic, focusing instead on imagery and subtle details of characterization. XXY (2007) was her first major international success, winning the Critics Week Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and awards at the Athens, Bangkok, Cartagena, Kerala, Ljubljana, Montreal and Sao Paolo film festivals. Intersex actress Efron was named Best Actress by the Argentinean Film Critics Association, which also gave awards to the film and its screenplay.

By Frank Miller