Close-Knit (2017)

Ogigami Naoko's Close-Knit (彼らが本気で編むときは、) is a very sweet family drama about a young girl named Tomo who is abandoned by her mother and who goes to live with her uncle and becomes close to his trans girlfriend. There are many different kinds of mothers in this film, so Close-Knit also gives us a range of possible ways of mothering a child. There is also a secondary storyline about a boy who wants to be Tomo's friend and whom everyone calls gay. This little boy waits for Tomo and asks her to hang out every day, and we slowly learn more about him. Close-Knit is a movie designed, in many ways, to normalize trans folks, to show that trans folks are members of families like anyone else, that they want to love and be loved, and that the desire to be a mother can be shared, rejected, difficult, complicated, or whatever, but being a mother has nothing to do with some kind of internal impulse that women who are assigned female at birth somehow possess and trans women do not.

This whole thing is just charming and sweet. The English title, Close-Knit, refers to familial ties but also to the practice of knitting that becomes a larger theme in the film – just another of its charms, honestly. I have no idea why this wasn't released in theatres in the U.S. back in 2017. It feels like it's something that should have taken off with American audiences, particularly at that time. I don't know what happened, but this is very good.