When It Thaws

by Anika Benkov
Feature Screenplay

An aging scientist recruits his estranged daughter to come to the remote wilderness of Siberia to help him resurrect an extinct species of woolly mammoth and restore the tundra to Pleistocene-era plains, battling the melting permafrost, and his deteriorating memory, in the process.

Anika Benkov is a nonbinary, Jewish filmmaker in the Bronx, who writes about radical transformations in self and society.  In 2023, their climate-change-wooly-mammoth drama, When It Thaws, won a Sloan Grand Jury Honorable Mention.  Earlier, they wrote and directed a queer-Hasidic-BDSM-romcom, The Binding of Itzik that won acclaim at both underground and mainstream indie festivals, including Outfest, NOFF, and SFJFF, where it won Best Narrative Short. Since then, the film has won multiple awards, played at upwards of 20 festivals internationally, and was shortlisted for the Iris Prize in 2021.  Anika first learned how to do film by filming their climate activists friends’ protests on campus as an undergrad at Columbia where they attended on a scholarship.  They worked with local labor organizing groups in NYC to create short video campaigns for tipped-minimum-wage increase at Dominos, and documented the efforts of striking Walmart associates in Texas, in 2014.  At Columbia School of the Arts, they developed a disciplined storytelling craft to help execute narrative stories with authenticity and accessibility under the mentorship of Sundance-acclaimed Eric Mendelsohn, prolific novelist David Klass, and Oscar-nominated screenwriter, Christina Lazaridi, and graduated with their MFA in TV & Screenwriting in 2022.