General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Tomboy (2011 film)

Tomboy is a 2011 French drama film written and directed by Céline Sciamma, her second feature, about a ten-year-old girl, Laure, who passes as a boy named Michaël among the children of a new neighborhood during a summer after her family moves to the Paris suburbs.¹^•² It stars Zoé Héran as Laure/Michaël, with Malonn Lévana as her younger sister Jeanne and Jeanne Disson as Lisa, the girl who becomes close to Michaël.³

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Céline Sciamma, her second feature after Water Lilies (2007)¹
Premise	Ten-year-old Laure, mistaken for a boy by local children, adopts the identity of Michaël for the summer²
Production	Script written in three weeks; shot in 20 days on a 500,000 euro budget with a crew of 15⁴
Camera	Shot on the then-new Canon 7D, one of the first narrative films to use this consumer camera⁵
French release	20 April 2011; 82 minutes; rated "Tous publics" by the CNC⁶
Awards	Teddy Jury Award at the Berlin International Film Festival; Audience Award at the San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival⁷
Critical scores	Metascore 74 from 20 critic reviews; 96% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 72 reviews⁸^•⁹
2026 re-edit	Sciamma re-cut the film, removing a slap, a humiliation scene, and the final line; the new version premiered at the Berlinale¹⁰

Spoilers

Plot

Laure, a ten-year-old tomboy, moves with her parents and her six-year-old sister Jeanne into a new apartment block during the summer holidays. When she meets Lisa and a group of local children, they take her for a boy, and she lets them. She adopts the name Michaël, plays football and other games with the group, and grows close to Lisa, who develops feelings for the new boy.¹^•¹¹ Jeanne discovers the deception but plays along, joining the group under the protection of her new "big brother".¹¹

The film follows Laure's practical improvisations as she maintains the identity: teaching herself to spit, going shirtless, and molding a prosthesis from plasticine to wear under swimming trunks.¹² The deception eventually collapses, and the film ends with Laure forced to reveal herself, closing on the line "Je m'appelle Laure" ("My name is Laure").¹³

Interpretation and place in Sciamma's work

Tomboy is the central work of Sciamma's unofficial coming-of-age trilogy, between Water Lilies (2007), about teenage desire, and Bande de filles / Girlhood (2014).¹⁹ Scholars and critics have read the film in two ways: as the story of a girl cross-dressing for a summer, and as the representation of a trans child.¹⁶ Sciamma herself has kept the question open, saying the film is deliberately open so that everyone can connect with it, and that childhood is a moment when identity can be played with.¹⁵ Some critics have noted that the closing line "My name is Laure" suggests the identity of Michaël is a fleeting one.¹³

Production

Sciamma had carried the starting situation in mind for two or three years but had not planned it as her second feature; the trigger was the desire to make a film very quickly.¹⁴ She began writing the script at the end of March 2010, finished it in three weeks, and shooting began in August, with two main sets and about 50 sequences. The budget was 500,000 euros and the crew numbered 15.⁴ She described the film as built like a thriller around a lie, so that the suspense structure could carry a documentary-style chronicle of childhood.⁴^•¹⁵

Casting. Zoé Héran was cast on the very first day of casting, chosen for her boyish manner, her love of football, and a photogenic face; Sciamma decided to make the film because of her. Malonn Lévana was quickly chosen as the sister, and Jeanne Disson, found outside the agency network, played Lisa. The rest of the children's gang was filled by Héran's real friends, kept intact to preserve their existing chemistry.⁴

Camera and setting. Sciamma chose the Canon 7D, a consumer photo camera, for its shallow depth of field and color treatment, and deliberately embraced an aesthetic she expected to look dated within two years.⁴ The setting is a fictional, deliberately undefined landscape of housing blocks and woodland in the Paris suburbs; Sciamma chose the forest as a democratic, timeless space where a child could discover themselves freely.⁵

Reception

The film premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2011 as the opening film of the Panorama section, where extra screening rooms were added to meet demand, and it won the Teddy Jury Award, the award for LGBTQ+ cinema at the festival.⁵ It also received the Audience Award at the San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, among other distinctions.⁷ Critics received it enthusiastically across the board; the French reception focused on Sciamma's pared-down visuals and ambiguity, while international accolades emphasized the film's gender themes.¹⁶ On aggregate scores it holds a Metascore of 74, with 18 of 20 critic reviews positive, and a 96% Tomatometer.⁸^•⁹ Reviewers repeatedly praised Héran's natural performance; Roger Ebert called the film tender and affectionate, and Philip French in The Observer described Héran as wonderfully natural and touching.¹⁷^•¹¹

Controversy in France. Two years after release, a petition gathering more than 15,000 signatures asked for Tomboy to be removed from a selection of films shown to schoolchildren aged 9 to 11 under the "École et cinéma" project, amid the French moral panic over so-called "gender theory"; the film still figured on the website of the "Observatoire de la Théorie du Genre" among documents said to prove the existence of gender theory.¹⁶ Despite this, the film has been widely used in French schools and has been described as groundbreaking in France in particular for that use.¹⁸

The 2026 re-edited version

At the invitation of the Teddy Awards for their 40th anniversary, Sciamma returned to Tomboy to craft a new cut, which premiered at the Berlinale in 2026 and received a French theatrical re-release on 5 August 2026.²⁰^•³ The new version runs 81 minutes, one minute shorter than the original, and Sciamma added no unused footage, only removing material.³^•²¹ She removed brief moments of violence (a slap), humiliation, and gender reassignment (the final line), saying she wanted to make the film more compatible with its young audience and more inclusive and tender, in response to testimony from young people worldwide who told her the film had affected them.¹⁰^•²¹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026