Tomboy

Céline Sciamma's second feature was written in three weeks, shot in twenty days on a small digital budget, and premiered in Panorama at the Berlinale in 2011, where it took the Teddy jury prize. It completes the loose trilogy of childhood and adolescence that runs from Water Lilies through to Girlhood, and it is the one that has travelled furthest.

Zoé Héran plays Laure, newly arrived on an estate outside Paris, who gives the neighbourhood children a different name and spends a summer being believed. Sciamma films at child height and in the present tense: football on the grass, swimming, the negotiation of a first friendship with Lisa, and the small daily engineering of a secret. Malonn Lévana, six at the time, plays the younger sister, and their scenes together are the warmest thing in Sciamma's filmography.

The film became a fixture in French schools and, later, a target for the groups who object to it being shown there — an afterlife that says more about the intervening decade than about the film, which is notably unpolemical. What it has instead is patience and an absence of dread: for most of its eighty-two minutes it simply watches a child being happy in a way that has been arranged very carefully and cannot last the season.