Anna Kerrigan´s second feature film Cowboys, which was selected to premiere at Tribeca in 2020 before that Festival was cancelled, smartly and subtly upends familiar tropes to create a film that quietly explodes staid ideas about masculinity, mental health and male fragility. Young trans actor Sasha Knight plays 11-year-old Joe, a transgender boy struggling to come out to his parents: Joe´s father (Steve Zahn) accepts his assertion that he´s not a girl (“sometimes I think aliens put me into this girl body as a joke”) with ease, but his mother (Jillian Bell) is not so easily convinced, falling back on conservative Christian ideas about the rigidity of sex and gender roles (“You’ve got one body. You’ve got one path, and God’s got the game plan”). Joe and his Dad embark on a horse-back trek across a largely untouched part of the American Northwest - breathtakingly shot by cinematographer John Wakayama Carey - prompting a nation-wide search for the missing “girl”. The film´s consideration of gender constructs, fatherhood and mental health is all the more radical for its apparently conventional packaging. “There´s not very many roles for trans kids, even small roles…especially transmasculine roles”, Knight told a reporter for Out Magazine in February, “it’s cool to be a part of something that’s breaking barriers.” Review by: Chloë Roddick