DIRECTORS’ STATEMENT

What interested us as storytellers was the opportunity to explore a married couple with secrets.

On one hand, Marco and Libby are in love. But Marco is hiding his true identity, and Libby is someone who “hears what she wants to hear and disregards the rest,” to quote singer songwriter Paul Simon. Libby is willing to ignore the holes in Marco’s story, until she’s forced to confront them head on. And that moment comes after a series of heartbreaking miscarriages, when Marco tells Libby that the reason they can’t have kids is because of a long held belief in his culture that anyone who leaves the community is cursed to be childless.

This curse ignites a fire in Libby to get to know her husband — she’s a curious person and a journalist after all. But the more Libby finds out, the more amazed she is at just how little she knows the man she married or the culture he comes from.

Not unlike other immigrants, ANYA's “Narval” characters like Marco struggle with whether they can belong to two cultures at once. Can they be Narval and American? Can they be Narval and human? If not, what is to be gained or lost by choosing one over the other?

We also set out to tell a great story where viewers experience a major scientific discovery from the perspective of researcher and “researched.”

We were frustrated by the many facile depictions of science in film. The cliche scientist is often portrayed in film as a wild-haired white guy (a la Einstein) who has all the answers and knows how to solve all the problems. The truth is scientists are flawed three dimensional human beings with feelings just like you. Scientists are even people of color. As for discoveries — they are often made by accident, not on purpose.

The truth is messy, and we like it that way.

With our backgrounds in documentary and anthropology, we embrace complexity and wrote ANYA’s characters to reflect the messiness of reality.

In ANYA a scientist discovers a new species of humans.

The discovery of a new extant species of humans is both plausibly unremarkable and profound in its implications. Our science advisors, geneticists Dr. Ting Wu and Dr. Ruth McCole, didn’t bat an eye at the prospect of a small group of people genetically incompatible with the general population.

Rather, the profound thing would be the world’s reaction to such news. We live in a world where fear of others is weaponized for political ends. How would a tiny minority survive the onslaught of unwanted attention? This is one of the questions Dr. Seymour Livingston asks himself when he wrestles with whether or not to pursue his research into the newly discovered Narval people, who have been hiding in plain sight in Jackson Heights, NYC.

We hope ANYA will spark a wide range of conversations from playful “what if” scenarios about finding extant species of humans to weightier talk of diversity in academia and film, treatment of immigrants as a second species, and the ethics and risks of gene editing.

We encourage you to:

• watch ANYA’s trailer (posted above and below),

• watch ANYA on Apple TV and Amazon, worldwide on Vimeo, and on other popular platforms and DVD

• like ANYA on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter

• rate the film on Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB

• check out our First Encounter Productions YouTube Channel with behind the scenes cast and crew interviews and clips from our other films

• share ANYA with your friends.

Why ask for your help? Because ANYA is an independent film and we rely on your positive word of mouth. Thank you for supporting ANYA!

One last thing. Most viewers appreciate the diversity of our cast. But a few people have remarked that casting a black man in the role of the lead scientist was “pandering” to “PC culture.”

Each character’s heritage matters to the story and was written into the script. Libby's experience as a Korean-American adoptee whose parents have all died allows her to connect with the secretive Marco, an outcast from the Narval immigrant community in Queens, NY. As an African-American scientist, Seymour (played by Motell Foster) knows that researchers have abused the trust of marginal communities in the past and he respects the Narval even as he bends his university’s ethics guidelines. Allowing Seymour to be brilliant AND flawed is one of the film’s greatest achievements.

-Jacob Akira Okada & Carylanna Taylor, PhD
Writers/Directors of ANYA

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