There’s something transformative about the summer holidays. Those long, relaxed weeks released from the constraints and expectations of school offer the promise of reinvention, of hitherto undreamed of freedoms. The blank slate of vacation friendships, forged in the moment, with no historical baggage to drag along, gives a chance to start again. It’s no coincidence that so many coming-of-age films unfold against the languid backdrop of an endless childhood summer. But for some kids, that sense of release brings with it its own particular stresses and anxieties. 20,000 Species of Bees, the assured feature debut from Basque director Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren joins pictures such as Céline Sciamma’s Tomboy and Carla Simón’s Summer 1993 (both films that, for different reasons, share a close kinship with this one) in using summer as the foundation for a story of a child struggling to find their place in a world that doesn’t quite know what to make of them.
The child at the centre of this lovely, heartfelt drama is an eight-year-old (a remarkable turn from Sofía Otero, winner of the prize for best leading performance at the 2023 Berlin film festival), who, throughout a summer spent with her mother’s family in the Basque Country, begins to assert what she knows to be true: that she is a girl, and that the family and friends who refer to her as a boy are wrong. It’s not an easy process. The summer, with its expectations of bathing suits and bare flesh, can be a mortifying time for a child who is uncomfortable in their own body. And, in a close-knit rural community, everyone knows your name – a constant, stinging reminder if that name no longer fits with who you know yourself to be. Rejecting her birth name, Aitor, and the gender-neutral nickname of Cocó, she finally settles on Lucía.
