Lukas Dhont’s script called for a teenager to tell a bedtime story about a black hole, but his 13-year-old star begged to differ. “I would never say anything like that,” Eden Dambrine told the Belgian director during rehearsals for Close. Dhont was relieved: He wanted his young performers to be honest, both on- and offscreen. Dambrine’s story of choice was about a duck and a lizard, and that’s the one that made it to the screen.

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For Close to work, everything Dhont’s actors did had to be credible. The filmmaker, 31, was telling the story of two tween boys—longtime best friends whose connection splinters when their classmates wonder aloud if they’re gay. During the ravishing half hour that opens Close, Dambrine and costar Gustav De Waele convey an extraordinary level of kinship. “They became coauthors,” Dhont says of the first-time actors.

The concept for Close came to Dhont after he read research conducted by psychologist Niobe Way, who followed a group of boys through adolescence. At age 13, they used affectionate language to describe male friends. But a few years later, as machismo influenced their development, what Way dubbed a “crisis of connection” set in. Words of affection disappeared. “We often get images of toxic behavior when it comes to masculinity—of violence, of war—but we so rarely get to see an intimate, beautiful friendship where two boys lie in a bed together and just want to be as close as they possibly can,” Dhont says.

As Léo (Dambrine) pulls away from Rémi (De Waele), Close turns heartbreaking. Dhont has heard from audiences who were moved—it won the Grand Prix at Cannes—and audiences who weren’t. He designed the film to prompt discussion, not unlike his 2018 debut Girl, about a transgender ballerina’s transition. “What I found so incredible with Girl is that it allowed me to have a dialogue with people who looked at it with different perspectives, different backgrounds, different cultures,” he says. “With Close, we tried to make a piece about fragility and about tenderness, but also what happens when we deprive young men of that fragility. We’ve tried to tackle topics that are more difficult to talk about.”