4/5 stars

Ever since Flemish director Lukas Dhont’s sublime Girl premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, it’s been picking up prizes and whipping up controversy. The Belgian-produced film, about a young transgender teenager, won the Camera d’Or for first feature in Cannes and has been nominated for a Golden Globe for best foreign-language film. An Oscar nods seems a certainty.

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Still, following this year’s Oscar win for A Fantastic Woman , which featured a transgender actress in the lead, Girl has endured a backlash among that community. Some have objected, perhaps with good reason, to the casting of a cisgender actor – Victor Polster – in the lead. Therefore, despite its good intentions, it’s inevitably a film destined to divide.

Scripted by Dhont and Angelo Tijssens, it follows 15-year-old Lara (Polster), who has moved with understanding father Mathias (Arieh Worthalter) and younger brother Milo (Oliver Bodart) to a new city, where she is able to study ballet at one of the country’s dance schools.

At the same time, Lara is preparing to transition after being born in the body of a boy. Sessions with a psychiatrist and hormone treatment are par for the course, with Lara desperate to change her gender. What impresses here is that Dhont does not reduce Lara’s troubles to external, physical bullying or transphobic commentary.

Her struggles are far more interior, particularly when the hormone treatment appears not to work. In many ways, her journey becomes a metaphor for adolescence, and the way most teenagers cannot help but wish their adulthood into being. The physical pressure faced by ballerinas, the pain the body is often subjected to, is another element Dhont plays with.