A Perfectly Normal Family

Set in the 1990s, it portrays the story of an ordinary family consisting of a wife husband, two daughters.

A series of home movies shot by the father are embedded in the playful domestic everyday life where love, play, sports, school, and work are lived very lightly until one day something begins to get in the way of the thread of joyfulness.

As soon as the pizzas arrive, the mother abruptly announces her decision to divorce as the father has an urgency to become a woman.

Here is the beginning of the difficulties dictated especially by Emma the youngest daughter, who rejects, the decision and shows up at family interviews with a scarf wrapped around her head, symbolically signifying the impossibility of listening, seeing and understanding.

A normative closure that of the senses, dictated by the double betrayal, in the eyes of the little girl, by her father, the architect of her passion for soccer.

The spirit of openness of the first-born towards in the change of her father from Thomas to Agnete seems to hint that in a more indefinite and chaotic age like late adolescence the acceptance of rigid gender indeterminacy may be easier to manage, as it is experienced daily on one's own body.

The first feature film by actress and filmmaker Malou Reymann, from whose biographical experience the story was inspired, was screened in the Voices section at the 49th International Film Festival in Rotterdam to prompt a close look at family and parenting along with a series of questions that the film inevitably raises.

Can becoming a parent before having identified one's gender be the subject of family discussion, can it result in trauma for one's children?

Can, should or should not the responsibility of choosing to change gender be anticipated, postponed, mortified by virtue of the children?

Can a family anticipate or expect to remain so by virtue of this change?

Does a man/father who wants to become a woman become a mother or remain a father?

How much can this transformation affect the growth and psychoemotional maturation of one's children?

What family is perfectly normal?

What is normal and who can be defined as normal?

A perfectly gentle film in its depiction of an unquestioning, inalienable love between father and daughters, albeit in the travail in life of souls swept away by the glare of normality.

A perfectly violent film in its depiction of the passage of a body from one experience to another tormented by habit and the glare of diversity.

Colors, stereotypes, conventions, perfectly normal settings for a film that works because the characters in addition to being excellently described are masterfully played.

The expression of a normal cinema, without creative flashes, without formal excesses, without capricious ambitions, reveals its profound ability to analyze and sublimate the daily experience of latent, stifled, removed problematicities in the caverns of a Manichaean and intransigent culture incapable of foreseeing that: