Every Body | Julie Cohen documentary

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Why ‘RBG’ Filmmaker Julie Cohen Joined Forces with Focus Features on Intersex Doc ‘Every Body

After a two-year hiatus Focus Features is back in the documentary theatrical game with Julie Cohen’s “Every Body,” a film that explores the lives of three intersex people.

Defined as those born with sex traits that do not fit binary medical definitions of male or female sexual or reproductive anatomy, intersex people make up close to two percent of the world’s population. By some estimates that’s as common as being born a redhead, yet the intersex population is largely ignored by society, which is one reason Cohen wanted to make a film about the topic.

Cohen (“RBG”) first came across the issue in 2018 when she was working with NBC News Studios. There she discovered the story of psychologist John Money who, in the 1960s, claimed that a child, without consent, would take the gender identity he/she was raised with rather than the gender identity corresponding to the biological sex.

“In doing research into what might be the modern-day relation to that story I came to understand the huge impact that this crazy, stranger than fiction, holy shit story from 50 years ago had and how it related to what’s been going on for intersex people ever since,” says Cohen.

In the doc actor/screenwriter River Gallo, political consultant Alicia Roth Weigel, and Ph.D. student Sean Saifa Wall recount their experiences with societal stigma, social pressure, and nonconsensual surgeries performed on each of them as minors. Their interviews combined with archival footage reveal that the medical community and society still view intersex people as beings that need to be fixed and kept invisible.

Despite not being a doc about a celebrity, a crime, or a sport, Focus Features is theatrically releasing the 92-minute documentary in 250 theaters across the country on June 30. Other recent Focus docus include “Final Account,” released in 2021, and “The Way I See It,” about Pres. Obama’s photographer Peter Souza, which arrived in theaters the year prior.

Variety spoke with Cohen and Kiska Higgs, Focus Features president of production and acquisitions, ahead of the Tribeca Festival premiere of “Every Body” on June 11.