If 2020 was not exactly a banner year for art-house cinema, with festivals either cancelled or relegated to online status and theatrical releases postponed or demoted to streaming sites, this was not necessarily the case for French filmmaker Sébastien Lifshitz, who managed to put out two of his best works by December: the feature documentaries Little Girl and Adolescents, both of which saw distribution and critical acclaim at home.
The former, a bracing portrait of a French trans child named Sasha, born a boy but convinced by the age of 3 that she was a girl, premiered in Berlin back in February (in the last major festival to take place before the pandemic struck) and then played to record audiences on pubcaster/co-producer Arte, which.