Berlin Review: “20,000 species of bees” with Sofia Otero, the 8-year-old Silver Bear winner

With the finesse of a bee searching a flower for pollen, Basque director Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren navigates the tensions and dilemmas of a family where the youngest member, an 8-year-old boy named Aitor, makes his way to a new identity as a Girl. Sofia Otero, who deservedly won the Silver Bear for a Lead Actress at Saturday’s Berlinale awards night, shows an instinctive, comfortable and generous understanding of how difficult her character’s life must be. Like Coco — the middle-seat nickname the family came up with to avoid anything too specifically gendered — Otero is by turns stubborn, tearful, mischievous and withdrawn. She longs for her mother’s understanding, but pushes her away when she tries to talk to her about why she doesn’t want to go to school.

Coco’s mother Ane (Patricia López Arnaiz) is a sculptor, never happier than when she is in the workshop where her father casts used metal figures for the religious icon market, wearing his stained overalls and a welding mask, breaking plaster molds or making beeswax models . like the ones her father made for budget-conscious clients. The family chat reveals that she went to art school and has now applied for a job as a teacher, which means she spends a lot more time with the beloved tools she inherited. There are no boy or girl things, she tells Coco. You can do or be whatever you want. It’s okay for a boy to wear a mermaid tail, no matter what Grandma – her mother Lita (Itziar Lazkano), who ran her husband’s business while turning a blind eye to everything he did with his models didn’t – maybe think . However, Coco is not looking for an infinite number of options; on the contrary, she yearns to define herself. “How do you know who you are and I’m not?” she asks her older brother Eneke, a straightforward boy who instinctively belongs to his father’s team.

Coco’s turmoil comes into focus when Ane takes her three children to the Spanish Basque town where she grew up, where her father worked and where most of her family still lives. They are an extremely intimate, inquisitive tribe who are quick to judge. Almost immediately, Lita senses that Ane’s marriage is failing and keeps coming back to the issue, determined to get it out of her. Her sister Leire feels that money is scarce and insists on buying clothes for Ane and the children for a family baptism. Will this be the moment Coco wears a dress in public? No one talks about it either, but her fear turns into a confrontation when Coco caresses the clothes in a designer store and leaves marks.

Only her great-aunt Lourdes (Ane Gabarain), a stout woman in rubber boots who has devoted her life to caring for her bees, seems pleased with Coco’s evolving self. Coco also feels comfortable with her. When she is near the beehives on the hill and Lourdes is fumigating the bees or cleaning the beehives, she easily calls herself a girl. In this rural place with its fog and buzzing insects, probably unchanged for hundreds of years, she finds a new friend in Nike, a girl her own age. You swim in the river, away from the teasing crowds at the local pool; They even change swimsuits. When Nike looks down as Coco’s swimsuit is removed, she doesn’t give a damn what she sees. “There is a boy in my class with a fanny,” she says matter-of-factly. “That’s cute.” At Nike, Coco first confides her real name, Lucia. His name comes from a statue in the church of St. Lucy of Syracuse, who – according to the devoted Oma Lita – “was punished for standing up for what she believed in”.

The beauty of this film is that Solaguren never tries to shoehorn Lucia’s confusion or discomfort with her mismatched body – at one point she complains that her toes are ugly – into a banner issue. She can’t name what she’s experiencing: she’s only 8. No one here is going to whine about gender dysphoria. They just have to learn to live with the situation that unfolds every day, an acceptance that children find much easier than the adults who worry them and mean well. Gina Ferrer Garcia’s hand-held camera moves between the characters, often uncomfortably close to their faces, creating a claustrophobic sense of togetherness that is offset by the tranquil fields and river holes, the rugged profile of the nearby Pyrenees looming halfway where Lourdes on her lonely bee farm is. Nature taught her everything she needed to know. Her grandfather said there were 20,000 species of bees, she tells the child, who she recognized as a girl. “And they’re all good.”