Oh boy, this wasn’t at all what I was expecting. I nearly skipped out of it because it was on at 10:15am on the 14th day of the festival and I really could’ve used a sleep in.

I often book films and go into them without really knowing what they are about, just that something in the synopsis has interested me. For this one, I think it was about the fact that it was about Tunisian culture, even though it is set in Belgium. For some reason, I thought it was about a young girl and a woman on some kind of quest. Boy was I wrong.

There is a young girl Eya (Safa Gharbaoui), who is prepubescent which means in her Muslim culture she gets to hang out with her brother and his male friends without restriction. Her brother Younès (Mehdi Bouziane) is her ally and gives her a lift to school on his motorbike and grudgingly lets her wear his football shirts.

So far, it is a beautiful and quiet domestic drama but then a death happens and it throws everybody’s lives off-kilter.

From this point on, what we get to watch, without any non-diegetic music, is the gendered experience of grief in this family and culture. And because Eya spends most of her time with the men of the family and her brother’s friends, we are watching male grief and how it plays out. It feels like a great example of non-toxic masculinity, at least not toxic for men.

It’s so interesting to see how this compares to acceptable public grief in my society and culture. For Eya’s friends and family, the focus of grief seems to be on the men, and they gather together, hold space for each other, pray together and provide quiet and solid support. In contrast, the women are wailing and being protected from becoming too emotional. The film title translates as ‘hot heads’ which seems to speak to the impetuousness of Eya and her brother and also the risk-taking and emotional combativeness of young men.

In the middle of it all, we are watching Eya try and navigate her own feelings. This is done in a very naturalistic way by director Maja Ajmia Yde Zellama in her first feature, and we can see the push and pull of devastation with the need for young people to dance and play and be distracted.

What I found particularly meaningful was the final scene of a funeral and where Eya stands in the family. I won’t say any more about this, as you will know what I mean when you see it. You can see that she is on the precipice of shifting from one gendered world to another and you wonder where her allies will go when this happens.

It’s my favourite kind of film – where you are watching one story and then realise you are being shown something else, something much more profound.