INTERVIEW: ‘Little Girl’ is a portrait of Sasha being herself

Photo: Little Girl, directed by Sébastien Lifshitz, tell the story of Sasha. Photo courtesy of Music Box Films / Provided by Film Forum press site with permission.

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Little Girl is a cinematic portrait of Sasha, an 8-year-old transgender child who has a loving family by her side and a community that is sometimes at odds with her gender identity. The documentary, directed by Sébastien Lifshitz, is now playing New York City’s Film Forum.

In the movie, Sasha lives her life in provincial France, all while her family faces resistance from the surrounding neighborhood and school system. Little Girl stands as a document of the struggles and triumphs Sasha has in life, and how sometimes other children can accept her for who she is, but not necessarily the adults of those children.

“It all began many years ago,” Lifshitz said of the filmmaking process.

The director previously documented the life of Marie-Pierre Pruvot, a transgender dancer whose stage name was Bambi. She was born in Algeria in 1935, and Lifshitz remembered having a conversation with her about transgender youth.

“I asked a question to her, and I said, ‘Do you remember the first time when you had this certainty of your gender, that you felt as a woman?’ And she said, ‘You know, there is not a point zero in my life where I realized I was a woman. I’ve always felt since I was very, very young that I was a woman.’ And then I realized you could be someone very young and already feel your identity, and I was very surprised by that because I thought normally trans identity is something that appears most of the time during your puberty or during your young adult age,” the director said. “And then I realized that it could be very interesting to … understand what it is to be a trans kid today in the daily life with your parents, with the school, with the society in general, and so the idea really came from that conversation with Bambi because now she’s an old lady. She’s 85, and I was just amazed to know from her that you could feel at such a young age that you are a trans kid.”

The challenge for Lifshitz was finding Sasha. He had no plan in place, just merely an idea, so he decided to head with his team to some schools and organizations in the local area. But that ultimately did not work out.

“And so after like maybe one or two months with nothing, we had the idea to just go and check on the internet if there was some forum where maybe some family, some parents could exchange their experience as parents of a trans kid,” Lifshitz said. “In France, you have almost nothing, no institution, that can help you if you have a transgender kid, so most of the parents feel totally alone and particularly lost in a way because they don’t know how to deal with it and how to answer to their kid. … Then we realized there was a French forum where some parents were exchanging information, their experience, and we put an announcement there. First, they were very suspicious about us, and it was a little bit difficult. And then little by little, we explained what was our idea of the film and why we wanted to do this. Then two mothers answered, one from Canada and the other one was the mother of Sasha.”

Sasha and her family tell their own stories in the film, and there are no interruptions from talking heads or “experts” on transgender youth. Instead, this is Sasha living her life, with the many ups and downs that come with being an 8-year-old, and that was intentional on Lifshitz’s part. He didn’t want the documentary to become anything but a personal narrative.

“Well, for me, it was very important just to be with her, to make appear her inner life,” he said. “I didn’t want Sasha to be a subject. For me, when I do a film, it’s a portrait. My intention is always to be the closest I can to the person I’m filming, and I’m telling you the story. So I didn’t want to have a distance with her and to look at her like a thing, like a curiosity. For me, that would be inappropriate, and this is absolutely not my position as a filmmaker. I try really to be with her. It’s a journey.”

The director added: “I try also to protect her during the whole filming because what you see in the film, you have the shield that the family has built around her, which I think is absolutely beautiful because they really want to protect her and to let her be who she is. I felt that I was a kind of second shield, me with my crew around. We were surrounding her, trying to help her to give her some strength just to go on because at school it was quite difficult from the beginning. Also, I didn’t want the film to be a file, a kind of sociological or psychological study. Maybe at the end when you look at the film you could say a lot of things about society, about human nature, etc., but my position was not to be a kind of specialist who is treating a special subject. This is not at all the way I can conceive films.”

In the end, the filmmaker wanted Sasha to be Sasha.

By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com

Little Girl, directed by Sébastien Lifshitz, is now playing New York City’s Film Forum. Click here for more information and tickets.