There is definitely something boyish about ten-year-old Laure. She has recently moved to a new area with her parents and her little sister, Jeanne. It’s summertime and all the other neighborhood children are playing outside. Only Laure is alone, because she doesn’t know anyone her own age.

One day, she meets Lisa, who is ten also. Laure allows her new acquaintance to believe that she is a boy. Laure becomes Mikaël. As soon as she has transformed herself, she begins playing with all the other neighborhood children. As time passes, Laure’s relationship to Lisa becomes increasingly close, making the ambiguity of her situation ever more complicated.

Director Céline Sciamma is part of a new generation of filmmakers in France. In an interview with Cineuropa in August 2007, she comments, “I became a cinephile as a result of young French cinema of the 90s: Desplechin, Lvovsky, Rochant. But I like Gus Van Sant and Larry Clark a lot, too, for their work on adolescence, not to forget David Lynch.” —Berlinale