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Sophie Mayer talks to Argentine director Lucia Puenzo about her award-winning tale of an intersex teenager's first love
Lucía Puenzo's first film as director, XXY won the Cannes Critics' Week Grand Prize as well as being Argentina's entry for the best foreign-language film Oscar. Behind this success, however, lies, many years' experience as a novelist and screenwriter. Oscar nominations run in the family: her father, director Luis Puenzo, was the first Latin American film-maker to win Best Foreign Film, for 1985'$ The Official Version (La historia oficial).
At the centre of XXYis an intersex teenager named Alex (Inès Efrón), bom with the chromosomal disorder that gives the film its name. Alex's parents refused surgery at birth and have moved to an island off the coast of Uruguay to escape prejudice. Then an old friend of Alex's mum comes to stay, along with her shy teenage son Alvaro (Martin Piroyansky), whose tentative friendship with Alex soon becomes romantic.
The film's distinctive landscape conjures Alex's liminality, equally at home on land and in water. Puenzo's next project, an adaptation of her novel El nino pez (The Fish Boy), suggests that this desire to exist in both worlds is something the director shares as she moves between literature and film.
Sophie Mayer How has the intersex and trans community responded to the film?
Lucía Puenzo: Intersex friends have told me they liked the film not because of...