Written By Arthur Sopin

London — Raindance Film Festival 2026

Not every documentary arrives at a festival asking for attention. Some arrive asking why the conversation is still so unfinished.

Viviane D’Avilla’s Let Us Be — a decade in the making, shot across India, Brazil, and the United States — lands at Raindance with that exact quiet insistence. It treats intersex lives not as a fresh discovery but as a longstanding reality still searching for adequate language and space on screen. At its centre is writer, activist, and executive producer Hida Viloria, whose presence provides continuity across a multi-voice structure that deliberately resists any single defining narrative.

Viloria has spent decades bridging public visibility and persistent misunderstanding — from early appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show and ABC’s 20/20 to addressing the United Nations in 2013 as the first openly intersex person to do so. Her memoir Born Both: An Intersex Life earned wide acclaim. 

It was praised by The New York Times, Rolling Stone, NPR, and more, and explores being born and coming of age in an androgynous intersex body, as well as her exciting journey living as both a man and a woman.

Visibility Isn’t the Destination

While LGBTQ+ representation has broadened, intersex narratives remain narrowly framed in both fiction and nonfiction.

“Visibility has increased slowly,” Viloria says, “but visibility alone is not the goal. Understanding is.”

D’Avilla’s film takes this distinction seriously. Rather than explaining intersex identity as a category, it creates room for difference without sensationalism or reduction. The editing is patient and precise: long stretches of silence between speakers are allowed to breathe, giving weight to what remains unsaid. Geography itself becomes a formal device — cuts between lush Brazilian landscapes and more constrained Indian settings quietly underscore how place shapes bodily autonomy and medical expectation. Archive footage is deployed sparingly and effectively, never as mere illustration but as counterpoint.

The film largely avoids the sentimental traps that often plague activist documentaries. There is little swelling music to cue emotion; instead, D’Avilla trusts the rhythm of conversation and the texture of everyday life. Interviews feel lived-in rather than performative, with space for hesitation and contradiction. The result is a work that becomes cinematic precisely when it stops trying to teach and simply observes people living.

Cinema Versus Systems of Control

Viloria resists reducing the conversation to political binaries.

“Cinema and the arts are some of the most powerful tools we have for exploring complexity,” she says. “Politics often pushes people into opposition. Storytelling can do the opposite.”

This philosophy clearly guided the production. Assembling contributors across languages, cultures, and funding challenges over nearly ten years was no small feat. Viloria praises the team’s persistence, and it shows in the final cut: the film never feels like a patchwork. Pacing holds steady even as it moves between continents, building toward quieter moments of intimacy that land more forcefully than any declarative statement. The emotional climax arrives not in confrontation but in small, accumulated recognitions of shared humanity.

Viloria has long written about family, dating, love, and intimacy because

“These issues have been important in my life and are universal.”

She rejects shame as the default intersex narrative, noting that many — herself included — experience pride and fulfilment because of their uniqueness, not despite it. She draws a parallel to the LGBTQ+ shift from shame to pride, arguing intersex people deserve the same dignity.

“We’re born with variations of sex characteristics,” she says. “The idea that these need to be fixed reveals discriminatory social attitudes rather than actual health issues.”

The Stories Still Untold

The documentary’s strength lies in its refusal to present any one experience as representative. It builds a collective portrait rather than a singular argument. Viloria is clear:

“Intersex people are not asking to be explained. We are asking to be allowed to exist without “correction”

Ten years from now, she hopes audiences will view non-consensual medical interventions on intersex children with the same horror now reserved for discredited “treatments” like conversion therapy. She wants storytelling itself to evolve — to show that intersex lives can be ordinary, joyful, and complete.

In the end, Let Us Be does not demand attention so much as a recalibration of how we see what has always been there.

In an industry still learning to depict complexity without flattening it, the film’s most radical gesture is also its simplest: allowing people to remain fully themselves on screen — not as symbols, but as themselves. That restraint, and the craft supporting it, makes Let Us Be more than timely. It feels necessary.