WHEN A TRADITIONALLY male sport runs through your veins and your parents come to you with shocking news about their marriage and his gender, your world turns inside out and upside down. Mind you, even if you’re not an 11-year-old girl football player, this kind of news will mess with your identity. A Perfectly Normal Family, directed by Malou Reymann is a Danish film and one of the pickings of this year’s European Film Festival South Africa, where it screens in Johannesburg and Cape Town, 9-19 October 2025.
And while the film is structured in a manner that broadly touches on all the cliches associated with transgender decisions and the pieces that come tumbling down in good old ordinary divorce situations, it is the performer who plays ‘Emma’, Kaya Toft Loholt, the younger daughter of the family, who makes this work sing with a poignancy that almost hurts, it is so finely tuned. On a level, Emma is a deadpan youngster who doesn’t smile often. Her passion lies in kicking the ball around and she hates the colour pink and pretty little age-appropriate frocks don’t become her.
When her dad, Thomas (played by Mikkel Boe Følsgaard) insists on being called Agnete, and tarts his brand new cleavage for all and sundry, Emma goes through the spectrum of emotional responses as she must, but her performance gives the work cogency. Like Bruno Núñez Arjona, who plays the child, Estefan in the Spanish film Sirât, also on this year’s festival, she’s unequivocally a child subject to the whims of grown-ups, and she has no agency, only thoughts that are being carefully processed as you watch her.
Further to the issue of gender: There are all kinds of details concerning gender realignment surgery that feel either like too much information or too little. Indeed, even after his transition, Agnete feels, in terms of physical awkwardness and basic gawkiness, like a drag queen, and the normalcy, perfect or otherwise of this family, requires you to squint your eyes and overlook inconsistencies in the picture, to see Agnete as woman.
On a level, this film feels too easy in its attempt to combat something as huge as seeing your dad having to dilate his vagina so that it functions. The main character is downplayed to such an extent that it could actually be a common or garden divorce story and it feels as though the director and writers are attempting to pack too much into the tale.
- A Perfectly Normal Family is directed by Malou Reymann and features a cast headed by Omar Abdel-Galil, Rikke Bilde, Jessica Dinnage, Mikkel Boe Følsgaard, Kristian Halken, Nicolai Dahl Hamilton, Kaya Toft Loholt, Hadewych Minis, Tammi Øst, Shireen Rasool Elahi Panah, Rigmore Ranthe, Neel Rønholt, Sara Bonde Tuxen, Wilfred Schandorff Worsøe and Peter Zandersen Written by Malou Reymann, Rune Schjøtt-Wieth and Maren Louise Käehne, it is produced by Matilda Appelin and Rene Ezra and features creative input by Sverre Sørdal (cinematography), Ida Bregninge (editing), Anja Philip (casting), Sabine Hviid and Kristina Kovacs (production design) and Mads Nikolaj Elley Jacobsen and Camilla Nordbjerg (costumes). In Danish with English subtitles, it is part of the 12th European Film Festival in South Africa, screening at The Bioscope independent cinema in Milpark, Johannesburg, The Labia in Cape Town and Hyde Park NuMetro in Johannesburg, 9-19 October 2025.