The winner of the Cannes Film Festival Critic’s Week Grand Prize in 2007, writer and director Lucia Puenzo’s internationally acclaimed “XXY” will open in New York City theaters on May 2nd. The film will be released in theaters nationally shortly thereafter.
“XXY” is also an official selection of the “New Directors, New Films” series at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (http://www.filmlinc.com/ndnf/ndnf.html), and will be screened as part of the program on April 4th and again on April 6th.
Based on a short story by Argentine writer Sergio Bizzio, “XXY” is a bold film about Alex (Ines Efron), an adolescent hermaphrodite, and her complex struggle with sexuality and the search for personal identity. The New York Times Manohla Dargis praised the film as “Emotionally potent”, and Cinema Without Boder’s Bijan Tehrani calls the film “Daring and unusual”.
In an interview with Cinema Without Borders’s Bijan Tehrani, filmmaker Lucia Puenzo reflected on her inspirations for the film, saying, “I was especially interested in the dilemma of inevitable choice: not only having to choose between being a man or a woman, but also having to choose between a binary decision and intersex as an identity and not as a place of mere passage.”
“XXY” was Argentina’s official selection for the 2008 Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language film, and won numerous awards at international film festivals around the globe. In response to the audience reaction in Argentina and Italy, where the film has already gotten a full release, Puenzo remarked, “it created a debate on what seems almost impossible in our societies: an intersex body that has not been mutilated, and not only survives but demands the opportunity to be desired.”