At first glance, ‘ANYA’ looks like your typical romance movie. Libby (Ali Ahn) meets Marco (Gil Perez-Abraham), they fall in love and get married. But when it comes to the next step for most couples– having kids– things take a turn, when Marco reveals that he cannot have kids, because he is cursed. The couple turns to a geneticist for help, but Dr. Seymour Livingston (Motell Gyn Foster) makes a startling discovery– Marco is a new species of human. And he’s not the only one. Once word gets out that there are a new breed of humans living among us… if you’ve ever read an ‘X-Men’ comic, you can probably guess that things don’t go great.
Inspired by futuristic and sometimes chilling developments in the worlds of anthropology and genetics, ANYA is a contemporary sci-fi love story about a couple whose determination to have a child leads them to a cutting-edge geneticist, an ancient outlier community hiding in plain sight in New York City, and ultimately, a life-changing question: are they willing to have a gene-edited baby, no matter what the cost?
‘ANYA’ comes from award-winning documentarian Jacob Akira Okada, and his partner Carylanna Taylor, Ph.D. Together, they wrote, directed, edited, and produced this mature love story based on real-world technology– think of all those Ancestry DNA ads you see every day. This is like an extreme version of that! This marks the first feature-length narrative film from the duo.
You can check out this exclusive trailer below:
Here is the full synopsis for ‘ANYA’:
In ANYA, a young couple’s personal quest to have a child becomes a provocative, yet utterly dramatic, exploration of some of the most challenging issues facing humanity today. Libby is a journalist who operates in the world of facts and first-hand observations, while her enigmatic husband, Marco, is the product of a mysterious culture he refuses to discuss. As they suffer through three miscarriages, Libby turns to science, hoping that fertility charts and thermometers will solve their problem.
But Marco feels compelled to reveal something he has known his entire life: his culture, a forgotten people called the “Narval,” who migrated from a remote Caribbean island, believes that anyone who marries outside the community, as he did, is cursed to never have children. Determined to disprove what is clearly a groundless superstition, Libby turns to an ex-boyfriend who is a rising star geneticist. A simple swab of the cheek, a startling DNA reading, and an encounter with Marco’s extended family, opens a Pandora’s box of consequences involving genetic testing, gene-editing, and invasion of privacy, ultimately raising a life-changing question. What does it mean to be human?
Giant Pictures will release ‘ANYA’ on November 26, 2019, on all digital platforms including iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, Vimeo, Vudu, Xbox, plus DVD nationwide.
