Alex Heeney reviews Rafaela Camelo’s The Nature of Invisible Things and Čejen Černić Čanak’s Sandbag Dam at Toronto’s InsideOut LGBTQ+ Film Festival: two sensitive films about young people that young people should see.
Discover one film you didn’t know you needed:
Not in the zeitgeist. Not pushed by streamers.
But still easy to find — and worth sitting with.
And a guide to help you do just that.
There was a time not too long ago when LGBTQ+ film festivals were filled with films about adults for adults. In the last few years, there’s been a shift: Toronto’s InsideOut and other LGBTQ+ film festivals are screening films you can and should take your kids, too. These are films about children that should also be seen by children: films that normalize a panoply of sexual and gender identities and that tells stories of queer kids in other parts of the world.
Many of these titles are getting the spotlight thanks to the Berlinale’s Generation program, which curates films about young people for younger audiences, and InsideOut regularly pulls titles from that program for its festival. Last year’s Centrepiece Film at InsideOut, Young Hearts, was another standout film that also hailed from the Generation program. It was about two fourteen-year-old boys and their burgeoning sexual identities, set in a contemporary world where labels aren’t required. This year, two films about children — The Nature of Invisible Things and Sandbag Dam — have lower billing but continue to be among the fest’s standout titles.
Rafaela Camelo’s The Nature of Invisible Things
It’s a shame that Brazilian filmmaker Rafaela Camelo’s lovely, inventive The Nature of Invisible Things was programmed on a Sunday night at 9 p.m., because this is, for the most part, a film you can take your young children to see. It’s also a film that, in a lovely way, doesn’t reveal why it might be programmed at an LGBTQ+ film festival. The film begins inside the subjective perspective of ten-year-old Gloria, hiding out in the bathroom from the noise at school, where she sees, in a bout of magical realism, a pig in an adjacent stall. And the film is at its best the closer it hews to her perspective. Camelo’s choice to include more of the parental perspective adds to the film’s ambition but also makes it not entirely just for children.
Gloria, we learn, is aware of many invisible things: the recipient of a heart transplant, she knows somebody had to die so she could live. Her mother is a nurse, and she spends her free time hanging out with the dying hospital patients, and sorting through the belongings left behind in the storage room. While spending her school break at work with her mom, she meets Sofia, who has accompanied her great-grandmother to the hospital after a heart attack. Sofia and Gloria become fast friends, but it’s not until later in the film that we realize part of that bond: they both learned young about navigating the grown up world.
A burgeoning friendship in The Nature of Invisible Things
Much of the film follows the girls’ burgeoning friendship, but there are tougher things in the background. The patients who dote on Gloria might also die. Sofia’s great-grandmother is sick, and Sofia’s mother is unsure how to manage child care and the care of a sick grandmother who she might also have to grieve. Gloria’s and Sofia’s parents become friends, too, bonding over the challenges and joys of single parenthood.
It’s not until late in the film that we discover Sofia is trans. That’s not a twist; it’s because everyone around her has accepted her identity and it’s a non-issue. Only it isn’t, entirely. Sofia’s great-grandmother has dementia, but her greatest desire is to return home. So Sofia’s mother decides to take her, with Sofia, Gloria, and Gloria’s mother. Only Sofia’s mother hasn’t been home in years, and many people remember she had a son but aren’t aware there’s a daughter. The family navigates the terrain of deadnames and dead identities sensitively, and even find a way to integrate Brazilian tradition of mourning for the dead as a way of putting to rest Sofia’s early childhood misgendering.
Shaggy around the edges, The Nature of Invisible Things is nonetheless a vibrant piece of filmmaking by a debut director to watch. It also has incredible sound design that bridges the gap between the strangeness of a hospital environment and medical intervention with the magic realism of Gloria’s and Sofia’s dreams — and the scenes their parents may imagine, too. We (and the characters) still hear and feel those invisible things.
The Nature of Invisible Things is still seeking North American distribution.
Čejen Černić Čanak’s Sandbag Dam
Čejen Černić Čanak’s exquisite second feature, Sandbag Dam, also comes to InsideOut fresh off its Berlinale Generation Premiere. It’s a sensitive story of two seventeen-year-old boys and childhood friends from a small town in Croatia who are each living in a kind of prison. Marko (Lav Novosel) is trapped in that town, unable to leave home to study when he graduates, stuck learning the family business, and hamstrung by his family’s and community’s steadfast heteronormativity. Slaven (Sandrija Zunac), by contrast, lives in exile in Berlin, not by choice but because his parents threw him out when Marko’s mother caught them together three years ago. Set over about a week when Slaven returns home for his father’s funeral, Sandbag Dam is the story of the boys finding their way back to each other and to the parts of themselves they hid away when they were separated.
With a screenplay by Tomislav Zajec, the power of Sandbag Dam comes through the subtle ways we learn about the boys’ troubled history. For example, early in the film, Marko sees Slaven struggling to carry a fridge into his house, so he decides to lend a hand. As thanks, Slaven takes an imaginary beer out of the fridge and mimes handing it over to him. Marko doesn’t play along. Initially, it reads as a bit of whimsy, but we later learn that their childhood game was playing with miming. This is Slaven’s way of extending an olive branch, and Marko’s way of showing he’s not quite ready to accept. The film is full of details like this, revealed in an offhand way before we know what to make of it.
The metaphor of the sandbag dam
The film’s title refers to the expected flooding that the town spends the film preparing for by building sandbag dams. It’s also a metaphor for the relationship between Slaven and Marko and their parents. For years, their parents built a metaphorical dam to separate them. Marko has even walled himself off: becoming an arm wrestler because it’s his father’s sport, getting into a relationship with a girl because it’s expected although it’s left a little ambiguous if she was just a beard to him.
But this week, when the floods are coming, Slaven’s and Marko’s emotional floodgates are ready to burst. It is a blunt-force metaphor, but it never feels writerly, perhaps because Cernic dedicates so much time to showing how everyone in the village is involved with the preparations for the flood, the sandbag dams. It also works well as a metaphor for how the entire community upholds heternormativity.
Keeping us in Marko’s perspective in Sandbag Dam
Told mostly from Marko’s perspective, Čanak’s choice to shoot the film with a roving, handheld camera (lended by Safe Place DP Marko Brdar) keeps us in his headspace. This pays off especially in the second half when Marko feels increasingly trapped and the camera get closer and stays tighter. Hewing close to Marko also brings great intimacy to the film’s most tender moments. Because this is a film in which teenagers have sex, but the camera stays on their heads and their intertwined fingers.
Rather than portraying Marko’s family or the village as merely homophobic, there’s much thoughtful shading here. Marko shares a close relationship with his much younger brother, who offers him a shoulder to cry on when Marko has nobody else. Slaven’s father’s death means he never had the chance to reconcile with his father. But it does allow him to form a new relationship with his mother that isn’t coloured by his father’s homophobia. Together, they share some moments of humour and solidarity that point toward a better future.
Even Marko’s father has a sensitive side: as his son’s arm wrestling trainer, he also tends to his arm muscles, in a scene of unexpected tenderness. Still, though, Marko’s past relationship with Slaven — the details of which the film never reveals — is a forbidden subject in the family. That is, unless Marko makes it impossible for his mother to ignore, and then her vitriol comes out.
Essential viewing for teenagers
All of this is to say, this is exactly the kind of film you want to bring your teenagers to: one that addresses the complex emotional lives and sexual experiences of its teenagers. It’s also a window into queer lives in a different part of the world where there’s more widespread homophobia, which isn’t as much in the rearview as we might hope. And finally, it has characters who, in 2025 can perhaps, thankfully, imagine an otherwise where they don’t have to hide parts of themselves. In fact, they may just find a way to live in it.
Darkstar Pictures will distribute Sandbag Dam in North America.
Discover one film you didn’t know you needed
Not in the zeitgeist. Not pushed by streamers.
But still easy to find — and worth sitting with.
And a guide to help you do just that.
