Beyond Visibility
As Viviane D’Avilla’s Let Us Be premieres at Raindance, intersex activist and author Hida Viloria challenges cinema to do more than show — it must truly see. Spanning continents and a decade of quiet persistence, the film refuses easy answers or sentimental framing, instead building a collective, deeply human portrait of lives long reduced to medical narratives.
Category Archive: interview
Following the screening, I asked D’Avilla and Lyss Ball why Let Us Be feels so necessary now. The film offers not a thesis but an encounter: a meeting with minds of uncommon lucidity, whose apprehension of life resists the coarse machinery of classification and the consolations of dogma. The Director’s response revealed the film’s beating heart:
“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.”
The achievement of Let Us Be is that it refuses the thin virtue of tolerance and moves towards something sterner, more exacting, more humane: understanding. It insists that visibility is not enough, that a life is not redeemed by being merely permitted to appear, but by being apprehended in its inward complexity, its contradictions, its irreducible singularity. Few documentaries leave one with a question so grave, so necessary: not whether we permit one another to exist, but whether we have learned to see beyond the categories that would diminish us.
Rarely has a documentary confronted questions of identity, bodily autonomy and human dignity with such intellectual rigour and emotional grace. Let Us Be is at once an urgent examination of human rights and a deeply affecting meditation on what it means to inhabit a self that exists beyond the limits of convention. Refusing both polemic and sentimentality, Viviane D’Avilla’s film illuminates the lived realities of intersex people with remarkable clarity, and it is the kind of work that does not leave the mind once the credits have rolled: it lingers, buzzing with thought, a genuine eureka of feeling and insight. As Lyss Ball, the film’s heroine, suggests, these lives are rendered with extraordinary sharpness in their dual reality, moving through everyday existence while also revealing something larger, braver and more expansive about what it means to be human. That is the film’s groundbreaking conclusion, and one from which we have much to discover.
Joe Corre: Burn After Reading
★★★★★★★★★☆ (9/10)
The son of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood has no interest in preserving punk—he wants to rescue it from nostalgia. In a blisteringly sharp interview, Joe Corre defends burning £5 million worth of punk memorabilia, dismantles Britain’s cultural establishment, skewers John Lydon with characteristic venom, and argues that rebellion cannot survive once it becomes a museum exhibit. Intelligent, provocative and gloriously uncompromising, this is less an interview than a declaration of war against commodified dissent.
A razor-sharp portrait of Clayton Patterson and the Lower East Side as a battleground of culture, law, and survival — where art was not a career but evidence of a city in freefall and reinvention. From police surveillance and court battles to the rise of gentrification and curated “authenticity,” Patterson’s archive exposes how urban life is documented, controlled, and ultimately rewritten. A story about New York then — and every major city now — asking a brutal question: who owns reality when the streets are no longer affordable to live in, only to consume?
Shoot Gallery’s new space in Oslo’s Barcode district reframes fine art photography as infrastructure rather than display—where curatorial authorship, branding logic, and market intelligence converge into a single, controlled visual system. At the centre, Helene Gulaker Hansen articulates a distinctly European model of the gallery: less white cube, more editorial machine for producing photographic value, taste, and international legibility.
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