Anniversary explores how even the closest family can be torn apart when inexorable social change disrupts their world and drives a wedge between them, exposing their frailties and destroying the fabric of their relationships.
The idea for Anniversary sprang equally from the head and the heart of co-writer-director Jan Komasa. “I always wanted to make a film that happens over the course of five, six, or seven years and to show the progression of lives and relationships,” he says, a storytelling puzzle that he found technically and artistically compelling.
At the same time, as the oldest of four children, Komasa — a Polish filmmaker whose 2019 drama, Corpus Christi, received an Academy Award nomination for best international feature film — was emotionally inspired by the idea of chronicling a large family’s evolution. “I was juxtaposing pictures from one Christmas with another and another, and I could see slight changes over the years,” he says of his own family. “It was always terrifying to a certain degree because this is something you have zero control over — time.”
Those two threads came together in Komasa’s vision for Anniversary, “a social apocalypse seen from the perspective of one family,” he says. “As those bonds are put in disarray, something that is seemingly coherent at the beginning becomes a mess.” He shared the concept with his agents, who felt a shock of recognition about the impact of social change on private ties — It’s something we see in our families, too,” they told Komasa. And there was only one producer they trusted to take on this provocative story: Nick Wechsler, “the No. 1 rock-and-roll producer to go to if you want someone with the guts to do something so different and so original,” Komasa says.
Wechsler, whose dozens of features include Requiem for a Dream and Magic Mike, brought on Kate Churchill (Spotlight) and Chockstone Pictures’ Steve and Paula Mae Schwartz (Wechsler’s fellow producers on The Counselor, The Road and All the Old Knives). “We became a new family,” says Komasa, and then it was time to find someone “who would take my concept and translate it into an American story,” as Anniversary was to be the director’s first English-language feature. Komasa found his storytelling partner in Lori Rosene-Gambino — an “under-discovered” talent whose work has made the film industry’s coveted Black List. “
Lori immediately caught the spirit of Anniversary, and she knew it was very nuanced,” Komasa says. “I was working with her over the pandemic, and we had many, many hours of conversations — we knew she would be passionate and meticulous, and she was.”
When he received Rosene-Gambino’s draft of the script, Komasa could see his film coming to life.
Rosene-Gambino and Komasa’s screenplay follows the Taylor family over the course of five years, from the parents’ 25th wedding anniversary to their 30th — a series of gatherings, a year or two apart, that reveal how a sweeping political and social movement, The Change, is destroying their relationships.
Writer Lori Rosene-Gambino says “The story began with an image of a seemingly perfect American family celebrating a milestone. But what happens when that celebration becomes a reckoning? Anniversary became a way for me to unpack how resentment, performance, loyalty, and belief collide behind closed doors, and how the desire to feel seen, or to belong, can turn dangerously personal.”
The Change
“It’s not a left-right thing,” producer Steve Schwartz says of The Change. “Authoritarianism is a disease that can come from anywhere. Everybody will have their own interpretation.”
“What makes the film unique is that it doesn’t moralise or take sides. This isn’t politics in the halls of power—it’s politics in our kitchens, bedrooms, and backyards. It’s about what happens when people feel unheard, unseen, or betrayed by the systems they once trusted. That disillusionment festers, warps, and finally shatters the bonds of family, revealing how the personal and the political have become impossible to separate,” says writer Lori.
Though ideas about human rights, freedom of expression, and climate change are debated among the family members, broader partisan ideologies are not. In the film’s second vignette, after Liz is seen carefully rehearsing for her introduction to Josh’s parents, Ellen is seen telling her students that she is “neither liberal or conservative. I prefer to be a free artist and nothing more — free from violence and lies.”
Even Liz, the mastermind of The Change, “is open to interpretation,” says Schwartz. “Some of the interpretations are political and some are completely apolitical. Was her attachment to Josh a ruse from the very start? Was it all just revenge against Ellen, or was it part of her strategy to advance her ideas? Was she always an extremist, or did she become more extreme from her association with extremists — or did she just crack at the end under the pressure of leading this kind of violent movement?”
For Komasa’s first English-language film, it turned out, “my Central European heritage played a big role in finding the right tone,” he says. “When discussing with the creative production team the political underpinnings of Anniversary, I always used the analogy of Polish history, in which people had the experience of living under tyrannies from the right and from the left alike.”
The idea for the altered American flag as the key visual representation of the movement arose from both its symbolic weight and its history of revisions. It would have been tricky to film the scenes with The Change flag in the United States, Churchill notes, had someone outside the production caught sight of it. “It’s a piece of cloth that people have died for,” Komasa says.
Anniversary tells a singular American story and centers on a specific family, but “the issues that this family is going through are universal at this point,” Churchill says. The Polish filmmakers, the Irish crew, and the American and British actors all could relate to the experience of seeing family and other close ties disrupted by seismic political and social shifts. Everyone on the set took ownership of the film’s mission to portray those rifts without landing in a specific place on the political spectrum.
“Audiences can expect to laugh, squirm, and maybe see pieces of their own family in the Thompsons. Anniversary is a smart, slow-burn thriller that draws you into a terrifyingly familiar home and then unravels everything you thought you knew about loyalty, love, and safety,” says Lori.
“In the industry, there’s so much disbelief that films like this can happen at all, and I’m a blessed, very lucky person to be given this chance.” says Komasa. “The 1984-like vibe that seeps into the film is the tone that makes ANNIVERSARY excitingly dystopian and thrilling, and steers it into a universal message about the ever-changing nature of reality, in which the only constant is love.”
JAN KOMASA (Director, Screenwriter) directed the Academy Award®-nominated film Corpus Christi (Best International Feature Film – Poland, 2019). Jan recently wrapped Good Boy, which will have its world premiere at TIFF 2025. Jan is attached to direct The Noise of Time with Thomas Kufus producing. Christopher Hampton penned the script based on Julian Barnes’ novel of the same name.
Jan’s previous film, Corpus Christi, screened at Venice and Toronto Film Festivals prior to being nominated for an Oscar®in the category of Best International Feature Film at the 92nd (2019) Academy Awards®. It dominated the Polish Eagle Awards with 11 prizes, including Best Director, Film, and Screenplay. His previous film, The Hater, debuted in Tribeca’s 2020 Online Festival Program and won for Best Feature in the International Narrative Competition. It was released on Netflix.
LORI ROSENE-GAMBINO (Writer, Executive Producer) is a boundary-pushing writer-producer known for emotionally rich characters, bold themes, and complex, thought-provoking narratives that capture the cultural and political zeitgeist. Alongside her husband and producing partner, David Gambino (“Perry Mason,” The Judge), Lori recently sold the television series “Summer House with Swimming Pool” to Sidney Kimmel Entertainment. Based on Herman Koch’s international bestseller, the adaptation is a provocative, character-driven thriller about obsolescence, layered with biting social satire and ethical dilemmas. Together, the Gambinos are building an ambitious slate of film and television projects.
The Gambinos also wrote and directed the short film Shooters, which garnered widespread media attention for its prescient subject matter and screened at numerous film festivals around the country.
Lori’s work has earned industry acclaim, with screenplays featured on the prestigious Black List and recognized as a semi-finalist in the Academy Nicholl Fellowships. Her Black List script The Murderer Among Us — a riveting exploration of the making of Fritz Lang’s groundbreaking film M— was named one of Total Film’s “50 Best Available Screenplays.” A member of the Writers Guild of America West, Lori serves as a moderator on the Genre Committee and is a passionate advocate for narrative with purpose. She curates conversations at the intersection of storytelling, politics, and social conscience, and has recently moderated panels on social commentary in horror and the evolving landscape of political narratives in film and television.
