“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.”

Lyss Ball’s words in Viviane D’Avilla’s LET US BE are devastating not because they are specific, but because they are recognisable. They describe the lived reality of being intersex, yes — but they also speak to a wider unease in contemporary life: the strain of existing in a culture that increasingly demands neat answers from messy human beings.

Following the screening at Raindance, I spoke with D’Avilla and Lyss Ball about why the film feels so urgent now. In Britain, where debates around sex, gender, identity and belonging have become more polarised than ever, LET US BE arrives as a necessary corrective to the language of certainty. It asks what happens when institutions, media and public discourse insist on categories that real lives do not always fit.

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.

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,”

Lyss said.

“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. 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.

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.

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.

“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 the willingness to change the way we see someone. To be accepted is important, but to be understood is to feel truly seen.”

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