Toi aussi ça te chatouille? (¿A ti también te hace cosquillas?)
2019 · 20m · Luxemburgo
Directed by Lucía Valverde
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Tones: contemplative, tender
Alba is blossoming. At that strange in-between age when she is no longer a girl but not yet a woman, she faces for the first time love, her sexuality and the overwhelming power of hormones.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A coming-of-age film about sexuality and hormones sounds like every festival submission from the last decade—except Valverde's bilingual title and the specificity of that tickle metaphor suggest she's after something genuinely off-kilter, not another trembling-teen narrative.
Valverde positions herself within a lineage of European coming-of-age cinema—tender, contemplative, formally composed—where the body becomes a subject of artistic inquiry rather than exploitation, a restraint that distinguishes serious work from the rest.
The decision to title the film as a physical sensation—that specific verb, *chatouille*—rather than naming the emotion directly tells you everything about Valverde's approach: she's trusting the audience to feel what Alba feels, which means every sound and glance has to do the heavy lifting on a 20-minute budget.