Niñxs

Niñxs, Ninxs dir. Kani Lapuerta, 2025, Mexico/Germany, 84 min., in Spanish with English subtitles 💖💝
Saturday, June 21, 2025, 1:30 pm Roxie
🌎 North American premiere
This program will be available in the Digital Screening Room, June 23 through June 30, 2025, anywhere in the United States.

Niñxs

Niñxs is a documentary unlike anything you’ve ever seen before. First of all, the director, Kani Lapuerta, is a transman, which already narrows the field quite a bit. The subject, though, is a young trans girl (about 7 years old at the beginning of the film), Karla Bañuelos, and we follow her through her early teens and into high school, navigating the social, medical, and legal processes of transition, through the Covid crisis and remote learning.

But here is where it gets really unique: in most documentaries about a living person, the filmmaker interviews the subject, but then it is the filmmaker who edits the film, constructs the narrative through line, and adds the voiceover. In Niñxs, though, Karla is involved in nearly every aspect of the process from the beginning. She provides much of the voiceover herself, and clearly had a say on the direction of the story and its visual aesthetic.

Karla’s circumstances are also exceptional. She starts in Mexico City, but the family move to Tepoztlán to get away from the air pollution that is giving Karla asthma. Karla’s parents are aging punks with their own colorful stories of adolescence, and Tepoztlán, less than an hour out of Mexico City, has a reputation as a haven for punks, hippies, and other non-conformists.

Her parents fully support their child’s exploration of gender and her decision to live as a girl. You may be quite surprised, though, at how much support the Mexican legal system gives: the Constitution prohibits discrimination of any kind, meaning that the school is obligated to refer to Karla by her chosen name and gender, allow her to use the girls’ bathroom, and respect her identity. Of course, she gets shit from some of her schoolmates and from random strangers in town, but the support from family, friends, and public officials gives her the room to thrive.

Karla herself sets the tone for the film: “I’d like [the audience] to laugh, that it isn’t a tragic film, like most of the ones we appear in.” In that respect, Niñxs is a rousing success, celebrating and empowering Karla and trans-ness in general. It is unequivocally a must see, but most especially for trans youth.

• IMDb • trailer • official website [en/es] •