Beauty
2018 · 23m · Canada
Directed by Christina Willings
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary, LGBTQ+
Tones: contemplative, tender
Five gender-creative children — Bex, Lili, Fox, Tru, and Milo — describe handling bullies, explaining themselves to parents, and living authentically on their own terms.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A doc about gender-creative kids sounds like it could be therapeutic wallpaper, but Willings resists the expected arc of suffering-to-acceptance; instead she just *listens*, which somehow becomes the subversive move in a landscape drowning in inspiration-porn narratives.
Willings places herself within a lineage of observational documentary that trusts silence and specificity—the formal restraint here recalls the best of contemporary nonfiction portraiture, where children's voices are neither adorned nor diminished.
The decision to let the kids' explanations breathe without scored emotional underlining, and to cut between their voices as genuine conversation rather than testimony, is what transforms a modest budget into something that feels like eavesdropping on actual thought.