Princess Cyd

Trailer.

Available Summary:

"A teenager moves to Chicago for the summer and finds a poignant mentor in her aunt and a sweet love interest in a girl who works in the neighborhood." -Netflix.

Jack's Summary:

I really, really enjoyed this film. The protagonist is an initially headstrong, arrogant young woman who is beginning to explore her sexuality, and who is healing from trauma. I interpret her aunt as being asexual, although that is not canonically stated.

The main love interest of Cyd is a gender non-conforming person named Katie, played by American non-binary actor Ro White. In this interview, the director said that he told White to, "rewind to a year or two before you fully acknowledged your identity as a non-binary person," explaining to the interviewer, "Katie is a girl in the film, but cut to two years later, I imagine they will have found themselves."

An encounter where Katie is assumed to be a guy by strangers, and happily does not correct them, leads to a scene where Cyd and her aunt briefly comment on Katie's gender identity, unbothered and supportive in a way which I found wonderfully understated. I would say that Katie is potentially relatable for a wide range of gender-diverse and gender non-conforming people.

The most confronting parts of this film involve an offscreen sexual assault (Katie texts Cyd, asking for help to escape the situation), and a discussion of unmanaged mental illness and domestic conflict which escalated to murder-suicide with a firearm. In my opinion, however, mental illness is not demonised by this film; Katie has self-harm scars which do not deter Cyd's affection and attraction. There is a happy ending.