Arianna grew up in the outskirts of Rome with the feeling that something was not quite right. Aching breasts, bizarre forms of osteoporosis emerging out of the blue, and, most importantly, the absence of a period, rang alarm bells that she chose to ignore for a long time. She took matters into her own hands and went to see a gynecologist, who revealed her family’s secret: she was born with androgen insensitivity syndrome, a condition that prevents the masculinization of male genitalia in the developing fetus. Chromosomally speaking she was XY, but her genitalia was ambiguous, so doctors performed surgery to “normalize” their son into a female. Arianna was shocked, but somewhere inside, she’d known this all along. “That’s how it is. If you don’t agree, there’s the door,” her father plainly explained. She left home and founded the first association for Disorders of Sex Development in Italy. The film Arianna will be dedicated to her experience, but is also the result of a long journey into the lives of many intersex people around the world whose stories and struggles with sex assignation and medical procedures are unfolding at a faster and faster rate. One in 1,666 births today is not XX and not XY. The mystical, the “unseen”, the undecided, the un-normalized, and transversal areas of gender and sexuality, are still considered a taboo today. These often-intangible concepts are bound to move beyond the scientific borderlines of hormones, chromosome alignment, and genitals. It is behavior, inspiration, anima, and feelings that make us sexually drawn to one another. If only this could be clear and accepted—the way it was in Ancient Greece, for example—it would be possible to ask the real, important questions, such as: what is sex, really? Once we remove the medical tools used to cut, sew, change, realign, and assign gender and identity out of the doctor’s chambers, what is left? 

Arianna will start shooting in spring. To learn more and contribute to the Indigogo project, click here.