Centring on a family faced with a gender crisis of their eight-year-old son, 20,000 Species of Bees is a study into interpersonal relationships that sheds light on the burning issues of gender and identity from a personal perspective and using metaphors from the natural world.
An eight-year-old is suffering because people keep addressing the child in ways that cause discomfort. They insist on calling the child by the birth name Aitor. And the nickname, Cocó, even if less obviously wrong, does not feel right either. During a summer in the Basque country, the child confides these worries to relatives and friends. But how can a mother handle her child’s quest for identity when she is herself still dealing with her own ambivalent parental legacy? It seems that grandmother shares a special affinity with Aitor, seeking to address the issue of diversity through beekeeping, which has always been part of the family tradition.
“The film is an homage to diversity, as vouched for by the insects of the title, which allowed me to work on the image of a family beehive, where each bee has its specific and necessary role for the group to function. This higher organism (the hive) is governed by its own rules, which is interesting to identify in a family. This is where the tension is created between the individual and the collective, with this portrait of different and diverse bees (grandmothers, aunts, mothers, daughters, etc.) that are necessary for social functioning.” (Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren)