Lyss Ball

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

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.

Exploring Identity in LET US BE: A Documentary Review from the 34th Raindance Film Festival, London

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.