L'immensità

The Italian film L'immensità is an enlightened and affecting portrayal of the suffering associated with “gender dysphoria,” a relatively new entity in the psychiatric lexicon first officially used in 2013 (American Psychiatric Association 2013). The film's focus is on the struggles of its principal character, a 12-year-old female at birth who was christened Adriana and is known en famille as Adri. However, Adri views himself as Andrea, a male name in Italy corresponding to the English Andrew, even if no one in his family calls him that. From earliest childhood, Andrea (Luana Giuliani) has endured a foundational conflict between his assigned gender and the male persona with which he wholeheartedly identifies.1

The setting for L'immensità is Italy in the 1970s, a place and time before contemporary concepts of gender diversity and trans experience were understood and accepted. With refreshing clarity, in L'immensità, Andrea's dilemma has to do with the most elemental features of personal identity. It is this straightforward but still sensitive approach that makes L'immensità a meaningful contribution to the current public conversation about gender. Much of the film's credibility derives from the real-life experience of its director and co-screenwriter, Emanuele Crialese, as a trans man. But in any case, gender-affirming medical interventions such as puberty-blocking drugs and surgical transitions would not have been available to Andrea in Italy in the 1970s. In L'immensità, Andrea considers himself to be properly male, dressing, thinking, and behaving like a preadolescent boy in the only way that feels natural to him. But there is a