Pip: Yes, you’re listening to Downtown 500 DISPATCH, coming to you from Elephant and Castle in central London — where the Northern Line rolls on, and so does the question of who has the power to define what it is to be human, often sharing the very same carriage.

Mara: This episode comes from Downtown 500 CREATIVE BUREAU, and it’s built around one piece of work: Viviane D’Avilla’s documentary LET US BE, which screened at the 34th Raindance Film Festival in London. The territory is intersex identity, storytelling, and what cinema can do that public discourse mostly refuses to.

Pip: Let’s start with what the film is actually asking — and why a documentary review turned into something considerably larger.

Intersex Identity, Storytelling, and the Cost of Categorisation

Mara: The review of LET US BE opens with a question the film never stops circling: what happens when the people closest to you — parents, doctors, teachers — are convinced they understand your body better than you ever could, before you have the language to disagree.

Pip: And the film’s answer, drawn from intersex lives across Brazil, India, and the United States, is that the cost of that assumption is not abstract. The documentary follows activists, educators, and parents — figures like Hida Viloria, Lyss Ball, Carolina Iara, and Aanandha Rajappan — as fully realised people, not medical case studies.

Mara: Lyss Ball puts the emotional core of that plainly. Speaking in the film, she says: “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.”

Pip: That line does something interesting — it describes a specific experience and then opens the door wide enough for almost anyone who has ever been misread by a system built for someone else.

Mara: The companion piece, “LET US BE, and the Question Modern Britain Still Struggles to Answer,” extends exactly that argument. It frames the film not only as a documentary about intersex experience but as a meditation on ambiguity itself — and on what happens when institutions treat ambiguity as an error to be corrected rather than a reality to be respected.

Pip: Which, in the current British cultural climate, is not a small claim.

Mara: Director Viviane D’Avilla draws the distinction carefully. Visibility, she argues, is not the same as dignity. Being seen is not the same as being understood. She puts it this way: “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.”

Pip: That gap between tolerance and genuine comprehension is where the film does most of its work — and it’s an uncomfortable place to sit.

Mara: The follow-up interview with Hida Viloria sharpens the political edge of that discomfort. Viloria, whose career spans early media appearances through to addressing the United Nations in 2013 as the first openly intersex person to do so, argues that visibility in film has increased slowly but that framing still lags behind. She says: “Cinema and the arts are some of the most powerful tools we have for exploring complexity. Politics often pushes people into opposition. Storytelling can do the opposite — it can create understanding before judgment.”

Pip: A decade in the making, shot across three countries, and still the simplest ambition: let people remain fully themselves on screen.

Mara: Viloria is also careful not to let her own story stand in for all intersex lives. The film’s structure is deliberately collective — multiple voices, multiple geographies, no single defining narrative. Her final reflection in the interview is brief: “Let us exist. Let us decide. Let us be.”

Pip: The title was always a challenge, not a plea. That reading earns its weight by the end.

Mara: And the question of how storytelling handles complexity without flattening it into explanation runs well beyond this one film — it’s the pressure point the whole conversation keeps returning to.

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Pip: The categories insist on certainty. The film insists on people. That tension doesn’t resolve — it just becomes more visible.

Mara: Which may be exactly the point. Next episode, we’ll see what else the bureau has been watching.