Devenir Elle

Director: Lidwine Herdhuin
Release Year: 2021

The documentary Devenir Elle, directed by Lidwine Herdhuin and released in 2021, follows the intimate and often unsettling journey of Andréa, who decides at the age of fifty to finally become the woman she has always been. It is not a story of abrupt transformation but one of revelation, a slow emergence into selfhood after decades of wandering through life with a nameless ache. The film unfolds with a quiet rhythm, allowing the viewer to feel the weight of those fifty years, the long season of hesitation and misalignment, the constant sensation of moving through the world with a mask that never quite fit.

 

Andréa describes these decades as a calvary, a word that evokes both suffering and endurance. She explains how nothing ever worked, no matter how hard she tried. Law school did not work. Photography did not work. Nothing found its place in her hands. The real torment came not from failure but from success, or rather the fear of it. Each time she approached something that resembled achievement, she derailed it herself. It became impossible to blame circumstances or bad luck. She began to realize that the problem was lodged somewhere inside her, in a mechanism she could not access or understand. This is the kind of confession that rings painfully familiar to many transgender women, the slow realization that life is not simply difficult but misaligned at its very core.

 

These fifty years were marked by a loneliness that she calls abyssal, a chasm that cut her off from everyone around her. It was not the loneliness of being alone in a room but the loneliness of being imprisoned within a self that does not reflect who you are. The film lingers on this solitude, not through dramatic scenes but through silence, glances, and fragments of memory. Herdhuin’s camera invites the audience to sit beside Andréa without rushing to conclusions or easy explanations. The documentary understands that gender dysphoria is often less about visible suffering and more about an invisible disconnection that erodes you quietly over time. Stepping toward femininity meant stepping toward an unfamiliar version of herself. She was terrified of entering a new kind of solitude, one that might be irreversible. She feared that embracing her truth would exile her from others even more completely than before. Yet she moved forward, propelled by something that felt both instinctive and urgent. Becoming a woman was not a decision to reinvent herself. It was a decision to stop resisting what had always tried to surface. 

 

One of the most striking aspects of the documentary is the relationship between Andréa and the teenager who still exists inside her. She speaks of him with a tenderness that complicates the usual narrative of transition. Instead of burying him or rejecting him, she takes him in her arms. She becomes responsible for him, not as a mother would be responsible for a child but as a woman who understands that selfhood is never linear. She calls it transmission, a word rarely associated with transition yet one that fits her experience precisely. By embracing the adolescent she once was, she brings him along into the woman she is becoming. There is something deeply moving in this coexistence, this idea that harmony is not born from erasing the past but from integrating it. The film presents this inner dialogue with subtlety. Herdhuin avoids giving it a literal form and instead allows it to remain metaphorical, poetic, and deeply internal. The teenager represents the years Andréa lived without understanding why she felt lost. He is the witness to everything she endured and the carrier of a pain she can now finally soothe. Through this echo between her present and her past, a new equilibrium emerges. The narrative shifts from despair to reconstruction, from isolation to connection, from fear to acceptance.

 

What makes Devenir Elle compelling is its refusal to sensationalize transition. Instead of focusing on medical procedures or external milestones, it foregrounds the emotional landscape of becoming oneself. Andréa’s voice drives the entire film. Her reflections are raw, vulnerable, and lucid. She speaks without bitterness, even when describing the darkest periods of her life. This gentleness toward her own suffering becomes one of the documentary’s most profound strengths. It shows a woman who spent half a century trying to survive without knowing why, and who finally gives herself permission to exist. The documentary also opens a window into the complexity of late transition. For many viewers, especially those who transitioned earlier in life, Andréa’s story reveals the depth of what it means to wait. To spend decades trying to fit into expectations that gradually suffocate you. To sabotage your own success because something inside you refuses to flourish in the wrong soil. To carry a loneliness so vast that even change feels dangerous. Herdhuin captures this tension with a patient eye, allowing every emotion to unfold at its own pace.

 

By the end of the film, Andréa has not reached a neatly wrapped conclusion. Transition is not treated as a before and after but as an ongoing process. What the documentary celebrates is not her arrival but her courage. She stands as a woman who has embraced her truth and who has made peace with the teenager she once was. Together they share a single body and a single life, one in which harmony no longer feels unreachable. Devenir Elle is a quiet but powerful exploration of identity, memory, and resilience. It offers an honest portrait of a woman who dared to step into herself after fifty years of wandering. Through Andréa’s words and Herdhuin’s sensitive direction, the documentary becomes an ode to authenticity, a reminder that becoming oneself is never too late, and a tribute to the silent, stubborn hope that survives even half a lifetime of confusion.

 

via: app.allrites.com

and vidafair.com

Image credits: vidafair.com