Maya & Samar follows two women from different cultures in a life-changing, week-long affair in Athens.Nikos Nikolopoulos/Supplied
The title characters have a lot of sex in the new Canadian drama Maya & Samar, about two women from different cultures who share a life-changing, week-long affair in contemporary Athens. But it was the opening scene, a moment of heterosexual oral sex that focuses on Maya’s face, that got the film slapped with an NC-17 rating. It was the only film last year to receive that rating, the Motion Picture Association’s strictest, indicating adult-only content.
“I wanted to tell a story about female sexuality from a female point of view, its rawness and realness,” Anita Doron, the film’s director, said in a joint video interview this week with one of its producers, Laura Lanktree. “The sex is not decorative, it’s not to titillate. It’s how pleasure, desire, feels inside women, inside the skin, inside the face. Not because you want to please somebody, but because it pleases you.”
The film's director says 'the sex is not decorative, it’s not to titillate.'Nikos Nikolopoulos/Supplied
Twenty years ago, Kirby Dick’s documentary This Film is Not Yet Rated posited that films that show women orgasming are often rated NC-17. It seems that taboo still holds. “Women’s pleasure is impossible to categorize, control and contain,” Doron says. “I guess that makes it dangerous. In a way, I rejoice that it’s seen as so powerful. Because it is.”
Queer love stories also receive a disproportionate number of NC-17 ratings, Lanktree adds. “I don’t know if that’s just a coincidence or there’s something there. But we don’t think the rating will detract Canadians from seeing it. We’re embracing it as something that might make audiences lean in.”
In the film, Maya (Nicolette Pearse), a free-spirited, white, Toronto-based journalist on vacation in Athens, falls hard for Samar (Amanda Babaei Vieira), an Afghan Muslim undocumented refugee who made a life-threatening escape to Athens from Kabul on the eve of the Taliban takeover, and now dances in a strip club.
Nicolette Pearse plays Maya, a journalist on vacation in Athens.Nikos Nikolopoulos/Supplied
Maya becomes determined to tell Samar’s story to the world, and Samar agrees – but not for the reasons Maya thinks. It’s a story of freedom told through female pleasure, and a story of agency that upends the expectations of a would-be white saviour.
A Canadian-Greek co-production, Maya & Samar was shot in Athens and Hamilton in a mere 16 days, for under $4-million. Doron is a Canadian-Hungarian writer/director who adapted Deborah Ellis’s bestselling book The Breadwinner for the screen; now she imagines that that story’s heroine – Parvana, an Afghan girl living under Taliban rule – might have grown up to be a woman like Samar. Lanktree produced David Cronenberg’s film Crimes of the Future (also a Canadian-Greek co-production). Maya & Samar’s screenwriter, Tamara Faith Berger (Lie with Me), and cinematographer, Christina Moumouri, are also women.
The two leads spent days before the cameras rolled co-creating their sex scenes with Doron, “breaking down and discussing every single moment” to ensure the nudity wasn’t gratuitous. As well, an intimacy coordinator oversaw the shoot.
“For Samar especially, her sexuality is an expression of her freedom,” Doron says. “It’s defiance. She does not consider her body or her desire sinful or forbidden. We wanted to really show that.” She also wanted to show that for these women – for many women – sex is about much more than climaxing; it’s about waves of intensity and the moments in between.
Originally, Doron hoped to cast an Afghani actress as Samar. She spoke to many who loved the script, she says, “but it would have put their families in danger for them to be in a film like this.” She was thrilled to find Vieira, whose background is Iranian: “Amanda has this incredible confidence, she owns herself, her body, there is intelligence in everything she does.”
The film premiered at the Thessaloniki Film Festival last November.Nikos Nikolopoulos/Supplied
In Maya & Samar, a male character dismisses outright the idea that a queer woman Afghani sex worker could exist; many potential funders told Lanktree the same thing. But the filmmakers know there are women like Samar – they interviewed several in Athens. “She exists, you just haven’t seen her story before, which is why we’re working so hard to tell it,” Lanktree says.
“Afghanistan and Iran have this incredible underground scene of dancing, music, queerness, sexuality,” Doron adds. “Femininity, sensuality cannot be constrained, cannot be veiled. They’re there. They may be hidden, but they survive with joy.”
Doron was equally excited to cast Pearse, and to portray a character like Maya, a young woman who’s brimming with and invigorated by life, who’s selfish and does what she wants – without being harshly punished for it. Too often, a woman who’s selfish is portrayed as nasty, Doron says, “but Maya is just a person, chaotic, enjoyable, adorable, owning what she wants, doing stupid things and eventually being humbled and learning.”
Queer Canadian drama Maya & Samar is a beautiful act of compassion cosplay
The “being humbled” part was crucial to the story: By luck of geography, Maya was born “with incredible privilege and without constraints,” Doron says. “She can run around the world and her passport is never a problem. Money is not about survival. That gives her this first-world, Western, global-north point of view of wanting to help Samar – without realizing Samar has her own agency and is making her own choices.”
“We flip white saviourism on its head,” Lanktree says. “That’s exciting. We didn’t set out to make a political film, but in 2026 a love story between two women from different backgrounds, different worlds is inherently political.”
The film premiered at the Thessaloniki Film Festival last November, but other festivals hesitated to book it. “We kept getting these conflicting responses, ‘This is a brave film but we can’t show it,’” Doron says.
“I hope people will watch it and realize it’s beautiful,” Lanktree says, “and embrace it for exactly the reasons other people are afraid of it.”