Why 'RBG' Filmmaker Julie Cohen Joined Forces With Intersex Doc 'Every Body' Reports

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

Defined as those born with sexual traits that do not fit binary medical definitions of male or of female sexual or reproductive anatomy, intersex people make up nearly two percent of the world's population. By some estimates, it's as common as being born redhead, but the intersex population is largely ignored by society, which is one of the reasons Cohen wanted to make a movie about it.

Cohen ("RBG") first encountered the problem in 2018 when working with NBC News Studios. There she discovers the story of the psychologist John Money who, in the 1960s, claimed that a child, without consent, would take on the gender identity with which he was raised rather than the gender identity corresponding to the biological sex.

"In researching what the modern relationship to this story might be, I am come to understand the huge impact that crazy, weirder-than-fiction shitty story from 50 years ago had and how it relates to what's been happening for intersex people ever since," Cohen says. .

In the doc, actor/screenwriter River Gallo, political consultant Alicia Roth Weigel and Ph. D. student Sean Saifa Wall recounts their experiences with societal stigma, social pressure and non-consensual surgeries performed on each of them when they were underage. 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.

Although not a celebrity, crime or sports documentary, Focus Features releases the 92-minute documentary in 250 theaters across the country on June 30. Other recent Focus documentaries include “Final Account,” released in 2021, and “The Way I See It,” on Pres. Obama's photographer, Peter Souza, who arrived in theaters the year before.

Variety sat down with Cohen and Kiska Higgs, president of production and acquisitions at Focus Features, ahead of the premiere of "Every Body" at the Tribeca Festival on June 11.

Julie, you developed this project with NBC News Studios. Since Focus Features is part of NBCUniversal, was it assumed they would take on the project?

Cohen: Nope. We had a conversation about pitching this project to a number of different places like streamers as well as a bigger entity like Focus that does a lot of storytelling as well as docs. Honestly, I wouldn't necessarily have aspired to Focus by taking this film. It felt like a distant dream. I did the pitch, which was complicated, and within a week I heard that Focus was interested in financing the whole project and being the distributor. The news was so good I almost couldn't believe it.

Kiska, what appealed to you about "Every Body"?

Higgs: Our partners at NBC Films, Liz Cole and Molly O'Brien, walked us through the project with Julie Cohen attached. We love all of these women, so it would have been an easy yes based on them alone, but it would also have been an easy yes based on the subject alone. As the movie says, it's estimated that around 1.7% of the population is born with intersex traits, but very few people (even in our age of widespread discussions of gender and identity) understand the complexity and the richness of what it means, let alone hearing. directly the experiences of intersex people.

In total, Focus has released 12 documentaries, including Edgar Wright's "The Sparks Brothers" and Morgan Neville's "Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain" since its launch in 2002. What do you look for in documentaries?

Higgs: We look for the same elements in documentaries that we look for in narrative projects: engaging subjects and storytelling that hopefully enriches and entertains audiences.

Julie, how did you decide to focus on three intersex people instead of one, five or six?

Cohen: I thought pretty early on that I didn't want to focus on just one person. I prefer to focus on three people so I can vary things and...