The Red Sofa Series-HOT TOPICS: LET US BE- and the Question Modern Britain Still Struggles to Answer: Can We Live With Ambiguity?

“We often feel like both and neither. We can see ourselves in everyone we’ve ever met while simultaneously feeling like no one truly sees us.”

When Lyss Ball speaks these words in Viviane D’Avilla’s documentary LET US BE, she is describing the experience of being intersex. Yet the observation resonates far beyond the circumstances of her own life. It speaks to a wider question confronting contemporary society: how do we respond to people who do not fit neatly into the categories we have created?

**What LET US BE Explores**

LET US BE follows intersex activists, scholars and families as they challenge the assumption that biological sex always fits neatly into male or female categories. Through personal testimony and medical history, director Viviane D’Avilla examines how legal systems, healthcare institutions and cultural expectations continue to struggle with human variation. The film ultimately argues that dignity, autonomy and understanding should take precedence over rigid classifications.

Beyond the Binary

At first glance, the documentary traces intersex lives across Brazil, India and the United States, confronting the reality of non-consensual surgeries performed on intersex children and the long struggle for bodily autonomy. But to call it simply a film about intersex experience is to miss its larger argument. LET US BE is about ambiguity itself — and about the violence that can follow when ambiguity is treated as a problem to be solved rather than a reality to be respected.

Lyss Ball’s contribution to that argument is one of the film’s most affecting. Asked what remains difficult to explain in a culture increasingly uncomfortable with complexity, she described the duality at the heart of intersex life.

“It’s certainly difficult to fully convey the complexity of the lived experience of an intersex person,”

“There’s a duality to our existence that does not always make sense. We often feel like both and neither. We can see ourselves in everyone we’ve ever met while simultaneously feeling like no one truly sees us.”

It is a line that cuts through the noise because it captures something many people recognise, even if they have never had to name it so directly: the feeling of being interpreted before being understood. Lyss Ball spoke of teaching herself to be “a chameleon” — able to blend in, adapt and empathise, yet still feeling as though she takes off a mask at the end of the day. Then came the line that stayed with me:

“Now, I just feel like I have a superpower.”

In that transformation from shame to strength lies one of the film’s quietest and most powerful achievements.

What Modern Britain – Still Struggles to Understand

D’Avilla, meanwhile, makes clear that the film’s urgency is not only personal but political. What began as curiosity became, over nearly a decade, a responsibility. She spoke about the project as an attempt to break a silence that has shaped intersex lives for generations, and about the danger of treating bodies that do not fit familiar categories as if they were errors to be corrected rather than people to be understood.

That silence is what LET US BE sets out to break. D’Avilla is not interested in reducing intersex people to medical cases, ideological symbols or abstract talking points. Instead, she asks why societies remain so uncomfortable with bodies and identities that do not fit fixed categories. Her answer is as elegant as it is unsettling: sometimes injustice survives not because it is hidden, but because it keeps the structure familiar. Ambiguity, by contrast, asks us to change the way we see the world.

That, ultimately, is why the film matters now. In an age of algorithmic sorting, culture-war shorthand and public debate that rewards speed over thought, LET US BE insists on something far more demanding: listening. It refuses the false comfort of easy binaries. It asks viewers to sit with uncertainty long enough to recognise the human being inside it.

The Human Cost of Simplification

D’Avilla puts this beautifully when she speaks about the difference between being visible and being valued. Visibility, she suggests, is not the same as dignity. To be seen is not necessarily to be understood; to be represented is not necessarily to be respected. That distinction gives the film much of its moral force.

What lingers after LET US BE is not outrage, though there is certainly injustice here to confront. It is something quieter and, in its own way, more radical: the sense that human life is larger than the categories built to contain it. The film does not ask for pity or even agreement. It asks for the freedom to exist honestly.

That is why LET US BE feels so timely, and why it resonates far beyond the intersex community. It speaks to anyone who has ever been misread, flattened or forced to explain themselves in a world that prefers certainty to complexity. Its central argument is simple but urgent: ambiguity is not a failure of identity. It is part of being human.

In the end, the film’s title feels less like a plea than a challenge. Let us be — not corrected, not simplified, not reduced. Just allowed to exist, fully and without apology.

Reflecting on the difference between acceptance and understanding, Viviane offered what may be the film’s most powerful insight:

“Acceptance can sometimes still feel distant. It can mean: I allow you to exist, but I may not really want to know you. Understanding is deeper. It requires listening, humility, and a willingness to change how we see someone. To be accepted is important, but to be understood is to feel truly seen.”

The distinction between acceptance and understanding runs through the entire documentary. Rather than asking audiences to agree with a particular position, LET US BE asks something more demanding: that they listen.

Key Themes Explored in LET US BE

• Intersex visibility

• Medical ethics

• Bodily autonomy

• Identity and belonging

• Language and representation

• Understanding versus acceptance

Why Let Us Be Deserves Attention

At a moment when public debate increasingly rewards certainty and division, LET US BE offers something rarer: patience. Rather than demanding immediate answers, it asks audiences to sit with complexity and listen to voices that have too often been excluded from the conversation.

That may be the film’s most important achievement. Not that it settles a debate, but that it reminds us why understanding another person’s reality remains one of culture’s most essential responsibilities.

As one of the standout documentary premieres at the 34th Raindance Film Festival in London, LET US BE demonstrates how independent cinema can still create space for difficult conversations that mainstream discourse often struggles to accommodate.

Perhaps that is the lasting achievement of LET US BE. It asks us to move beyond acceptance towards understanding, and to recognise that, as D’Avilla ultimately concludes:

“Difference is not the opposite of humanity. Difference is part of humanity.”

Written by Arthur Sopin

Especially for the 34th Raindance Film Festival in London, June 2026

I extend my warmest regards and profound thanks to David Martinez of Raindance FF and Denise Parkinson of Variety—two tireless advocates for culture whose commitment to identifying and nurturing exceptional voices continues to resonate across the international creative landscape. Their work is a reminder that festivals and text-creators, at their best, perform the same vital task: revealing stories that might otherwise go unheard.