Foreign Body
Date:
December 15, 2022
Foreign Body
Foreign Body
by Anita Rivaroli
Indyca, The Family | Italy
Studio Virc | Slovenia
Documentary | 2nd feature
Logline
Twenty years after leaving Jehovah’s Witnesses, Amos returns to his small village in Calabria to declare what he never dared to say: his homosexuality. To face the toughest showdown, his mother, he begins a journey of psychodrama to reopen long-buried wounds.
Synopsis
Amos is a young man who escaped from the Jehovah’s Witnesses organization where he was born and raised for 24 years. Now 40 years old, he is finally ready to come to terms with what he left behind. He wants to stop running away and feeling ashamed of his homosexuality: he finally feels ready to live it to the fullest, without shame or guilt.
He has a fulfilling career as a set designer in Milan, where he has a partner, friends, and lives with his inseparable dog Stella. Despite this stability, the demons of his past still haunt him. Amos feels the need to talk about himself and relive the pain of separation from his family and the Jehovah’s Witness community. He must face his anxiety, feelings of inadequacy, and fear.
Through psychodrama, together with therapist Tomi Janezic and a group of former Jehovah’s Witnesses, he confronts the main traumas that characterized his childhood and adolescence.
He uses his talent as a set designer to give shape to the symbolic objects of his previous life, which bring back old memories and new awareness: we see him in front of a large intercom who emits snippets of conversations from his past activity as a preacher, overwhelmed by a multitude of Jehovah’s eyes, face to face with the giant whale that swallowed Jonah…
At the same time, his life goes on amid job satisfaction and small daily challenges, punctuated by weekly phone calls with his mother, the only person in the Congregation with whom he has maintained a relationship, but who constantly wishes him to “recover from homosexuality.” He manages to face the verbal attacks with irony and detachment and seeks a sincere dialogue that, over time, helps him find the courage to undertake a journey that leads him to cut ties with a past that has always made him feel like an outcast.
Director’s Profile
Anita Rivaroli is an Italian screenwriter and director. She graduated at Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, Italy, in screenwriting, but from the diploma project onwards – a short written and directed instead of a script – she understood she wanted to stage her stories, so she embarked on the path of self-taught directing. Her very first experience in the field has been working as delegated producer and story editor for one of the Italian biggest production company, Cattleya.
She worked for popular TV shows such as Gomorrah, Tutto può succedere, Ragion di Stato, Grand Hotel, La strada dritta. It has been an intensive gym to understand dynamics of the set and to get to know the directing department closely. After that, she continues collaborating with several film companies, as a freelance screenwriter and director. She is the co-founder of the Rockin’1000 project, for which she directed and supervised music videos and live performances, some of which have reached several million views. Her first feature-length music documentary is WE ARE THE THOUSAND (2020) produced by Indyca, which was distributed internationally and won several awards.
In 2025 Anita received a nomination for David di Donatello (best original screenplay), was selected at Berlinale Talents and Venezia Biennale College Cinema with a live-action feature now in development.
Company Profile
Indyca is a production company founded in 2007 in Turin, specializing in the production of innovative documentaries and auteur films with strong international appeal. Over the years, Indyca has earned a solid reputation as a co-producer of international films, collaborating with countries around the world and receiving prestigious support from Eurimages, Ibermedia, the Creative Europe Media program, as well as other national and international funds.
Always in search of international collaborators and new expressions of the human spirit, Indyca is investing heavily in the European and global artistic landscape.
In 2024, we released THE SECRET DRAWER by Costanza Quatriglio (which premiered at Berlinale, won Nastro D’Argento for Best Documentary, shortlisted at David di Donatello), SAMIA by Yasemin Samdereli (which premiered and was awarded at the Tribeca Film Festival, Munich Film Festival, and Alice nella Città), and HONEYDEW (which premiered at Festival dei Popoli, Thessaloniki and Santa Barbara).