Bullseye with Jessie Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR.

It's Bullseye, I'm Jessie Thorn. I want to tell you about a new documentary it's called Little Girl.

It's set in France in a small suburban town. Little Girl centers around Sasha, who's eight.

When the movie opens you see Sasha get ready for her day. She's just put on a sequined dress.

She fuses with her hair band, she tries on a silly hat, takes off the silly hat, then goes out to play in the snow.

In the next scene, it's Sasha's mother, she's talking with a doctor. She tells him in French, Sasha is a little girl.

The doctor starts asking pointed questions, how do you know? He uses male pronouns for Sasha.

Sasha's mom walks the doctor through all of it. She's polite of course, but you can tell how exhausting this all is for her.

In Little Girl directed by my guest Sebastian Liftschitz, that's more or less the film's conflict.

It dominates the life of Sasha and her family. Everywhere Sasha goes, school the pool, ballet class, the department store, explaining who she is, answering questions, fighting to clarify something.

It's so simple. Little Girl shows in very real and plain terms what it's like to be a transgender child, to be part of that child's family, to raise and love that child.

It's a beautiful film. By the way, you might hear as I talk to Sebastian a little bit of emotion in my voice, that's because one of my own children is transgender.

So let's get into it. My conversation with director Sebastian Liftschitz.

Well Sebastian, welcome to Bullseye, so happy to have you on the show. Hello. Why did you want to make a film about a transgender child and their family?

Well, first of all, I would like to say that I'm French as you can here. And my English is not like fluent, but I will try to do my best.

It's better than my French Sebastian.

Okay, so the idea of the film came from a conversation that I had with Bambi, not the character of the Walt Disney movie, of course. Bambi was one of the first French transgender women in France.

And she had an amazing life and I did a film portrait about her. And I remember she was born in 1935, so a long time ago in Algeria.

And I remember during a conversation with her, I asked her when she realized that she was a woman, if there was a special moment, a specific moment where it was like obvious for her that she was a woman.

And she answered that for her, she didn't have a kind of revelation at a very specific moment. She always felt as a kid that she was the other sex, that she was a woman born as a boy.

And so I realized that so you could have this feeling, this certainty when you are a kid, you know, and I didn't know that at that time.

I thought like a lot of people that dysphoria, the trans identity could normally appear during puberty or with the beginning of your sexuality.

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