‘Half of Ana’: gender identity and vital corners in a girl and a mother | Culture

The world, our world, anyone’s, is never linear. Even less, circular. The world, as painted by Ángeles Santos at the age of 17 in his prestigious painting of the same name, is full of corners, revolts, different faces that are the same and different at the same time, between the everyday and the magical, between the palpable and dreamy. A painting that the new filmmaker and frequent actress Marta Nieto has chosen to symbolically guide her directorial debut, in which she also stars: Half of Ana, a story of self-discovery that travels in a double direction while maintaining a constant, the love between a mother and her seven-year-old daughter, in which the feeling that her gender identity does not coincide with her sex has begun to nest, although, Obviously, she didn’t express it that way.

In principle, the film has been and will continue to be among the various recent works that have addressed a topic as contemporary as that of gender transition in childhood. But Nieto focuses not so much on that person in training who asks her mother “why” she is “a girl,” as on that parent who struggles within herself with many concerns, from the emotional to the work-related, including the sentimental and sexual. In fact, uncertainty (that of both) could be the central axis of a story that spreads its wings through numerous aspects (like the dreamy drawings that the mother makes at the request of her daughter), not always with sufficient depth, although with courage and a certain capacity for suggestion.

The story of Half of Ana, which is born from the essence of a previous short film, Son (2022), with which the magnificent actress Nieto took her first steps as a director, It begins with a series of everyday situations between mother and daughter that, rather than being subtle, seem to progress with excessive simplicity. The film takes a while to start, but when it does, already armed with the concreteness and impetus of its theme, and also from the most symbolic flank – that of the Santos painting, from 1929, located in the Reina Sofía Museum, where precisely the mother works—, reaches an estimable level.

Now, the inequality of situations is constant in a work that is as ambitious as it is difficult to achieve. Compared to some moments of walking around the house that do not achieve the necessary truth (the basketball sequences at school; those of her work doubts), there are exciting moments, such as the reading in which, from the point of view of the parents in hiding, their daughter asking her classmates to treat her like a boy, or the (inevitable) disagreements with other family members due to the complexity of the situation.

Buoyed by the need for personal passions and, above all, by the indisputable love for children, Half of Ana, like the outstanding 20,000 species of bees, It has the merit of leading the viewer towards a constant question, towards an internal reflection on a central issue in today’s societies, and how it affects and concerns us all. The corners of a world like that of Santos’ painting. However, there is also a basic aspect in the creation of a film like this, which runs throughout the entire story, and which does not favor it: the lack of chemistry between the actress Nieto and the newcomer Noa Álvarez, which at least this The critic cannot quite see if it is sought because of the special circumstances of the story, or because artistically it has not been possible to reach the necessary plenitude through interpretive direction.