Overview

An eight-year-old child suffers from people persistently calling him by his birth name, "Aitor," which makes him uncomfortable. His nickname, "Cocó," doesn't feel quite as wrong, but it doesn't feel right either. On summer vacation in the Basque Country, the child confides his grief to relatives and friends. But how does a mother, herself still wrestling with ambivalent parental baggage, deal with her child's search for identity? Basque director Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren's feature debut is a sunny, wonderfully empathetic work, carried by Sofía Otero as a little girl searching for the right name for the first time in front of the camera, and Patricia López Arnaiz as a problem-ridden, loving mother. Just as the diversity of nature requires many species of bees, the supporting characters are essential to the protagonist. The largely female environment models for her different ways of being a woman. Urresola takes more than one point of view, respecting that gender identity is something outrageously complex. And she addresses a perhaps less obvious aspect of gender transition: one's own mentality.