Animal Heart
The pain of pregnancy is deep and messy.
Project type: Fiction Feature
Project status: Development
Writer/Director: Sahra Bhimji
Producer: Jeff Allard
Producer: Ipsheeta Furtado
Associate Producer: Anna Robertson
Line Producer: Maria Leon
Website: sahrabhimji.com
Instagram: @animalheartfilm
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Logline
After a designer embryo fails to implant, a woman is lured to a remote organic farm for an unusual pregnancy arrangement. But when her body starts transforming in animalistic ways, she learns her hosts are hiding a secret that forces her to choose between motherhood and survival.
Synopsis
Single, 40-year-old video game artist Caroline tracks every data point from her body monitor in hopes of becoming pregnant. After her expensive designer embryo fails to implant, she’s left devastated and broke. An online connection leads her to Chase, a gentle man offering to donate his sperm for the sake of altruism, but only if she’ll spend pregnancy on his remote organic farm, lead a fully natural life and abandon her implants or monitoring gadgets.
At the farm, Caroline is surprised by the warmth of Chase’s extended family and quickly bonds with his shy 6-year old daughter, whose mother is mysteriously absent. After she discovers she’s pregnant, she starts to develop romantic feelings for Chase, who eagerly reciprocates. She suddenly has something she never dreamt of: the possibility of a whole new family. But her body starts displaying strange pregnancy symptoms: her senses sharpen, fur sprouts, her teeth elongate, and she loses control. As her pregnant body grows more like a wild animal, she becomes a danger to the family, and she flees to the woods in both terror and shame.
In the woods, she finds something she never imagined: Chase hiding a caged lion-woman hybrid! Just like Caroline, this woman wanted a baby, but couldn’t get pregnant, and, in a grafting experiment gone too far, she transformed. Horrified, she runs away, only to go into labor and deliver a stillborn hybrid human-lion cub. Injured and in shock, she consumes the placenta and lets her primal instincts surge. She hunts Chase through the forest, eventually leaving him at the mercy of his own monstrous creation, the lioness, who consumes him. Back at the farmhouse, Caroline buries her cub, removes her graft, and begins a new life—one where she’s a mother, and undeniably, defiantly human.
Meet the Filmmakers
Sahra Bhimji — Writer/Director
Sahra Bhimji is a filmmaker and storyteller whose work drifts between the poetic and the uncanny—where science meets emotion, and the surreal feels utterly human. Her films, from geeky comedies to haunting psychological dramas, have screened around the world, including SF Indie Fest, the London Short Film Festival, CineGlobe, and the Seoul International Green Film Festival, and have racked up over a million views on YouTube. A Stowe Story Labs alumna and twice Filmaka.com grand jury prize winner, her scripts have also placed at Cinequest and Stanford’s All Write Now screenwriting competitions.
Sahra earned a BS from Stanford University and an MFA from San Francisco State University, where she spent her final year at the Université de Paris. For the past ten years, Sahra has been teaching filmmaking, and is now a tenured professor in film production at Diablo Valley College, where she serves as the career education lead for the department of Film, Television, and Electronic Media. When she’s not teaching or making films, you can find her hiking with her dog, playing with her kids, and eating very dark chocolate
Jeff Allard — Producer
Jeff has produced over 20 films which in total have grossed over $250 Million. Jeff is most well-known for Executive Producing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003 & 2006) alongside Michael Bay (Transformers), and for the critically acclaimed family comedy, Ping Pong Summer which starred Academy Award winner Susan Sarandon and premiered at the Sundance Film Festival before its theatrical release. In 2025, Jeff released Thirsty starring Sung Kang (Fast & Furious) and Kyra Sedgwick (The Closer) and Consumed starring Devon Sawa (Casper, Final Destination) which was released theatrically. Other recent releases include Stars Fell On Alabama (James Maslow) released in 2021 by Samuel Goldwyn Meyer, Star Light (Scout TaylorCompton), Don’t Leave Home (Anna Margaret Hollyman), For The Love Of George (Rosanna Arquette), and the award winning documentary, The Push. Prior to founding his production company, Indie Entertainment, in 2002, Jeff served as Chief Operating Officer of Bay View Capital’s commercial leasing operations ($5 billion NYSE listed company acquired by US Bank Corp) and held executive positions in the corporate finance industry for over 18 years.
Ipsheeta Furtado — Producer
By day, Ipsheeta is a technology entrepreneur with over a decade of experience in venture-backed fintech startups and, by night, a writer and theater artist. She weaves the supernatural into her work with counter culture female characters, generational paradigms, and the technology economy. Her plays are influenced by the Central Works Method and she serves on the Board of Directors for the Bay Area’s Shotgun Players & 3Girls Theatre Company. She is an alumna of Voices of Our Nations Arts (VONA) Foundation and SF Writers Grotto Rooted & Written residencies and co-founded The Network Effects Theater (incubated by PlaygroundSF) to make passive impossible in the Bay Area. She is Meisner trained and performs locally in musical theatre and improv. Her published poetry, garment sewing, and dance classes can be found on Instagram @_ipsheeta. Ipsheeta holds a B.S. in Engineering Physics from UC Berkeley and prefers tea over coffee.
Anna Robertson — Associate Producer
Anna Robertson is a San Francisco-based producer, writer, and filmmaker. With over a decade of experience in production, Anna has worked on Hollywood films such as Bumblebee, Solo: A Star Wars Story, and Venom and produced shoots for clients like NBC Sports, Wells Fargo, and GQ.
Maria León — Line Producer
Maria F. León brings more than 15-years of production experience in broadcast television, marketing videos, award winning documentaries, short and feature films from independent productions and top studios like Independent Television Service, Lionsgate Films, Radical Media, Paramount Pictures and Annapurna. She has produced commercials and web series for clients like Adobe, Salesforce, Dockers, Ancestry.com, Zynga, Nextracker, PAN America and PBS, including the Emmy Nominated series Brief But Spectacular. Maria received her BA in Cinema Arts and has a Masters of Fine Arts from Harvard University. She has impeccable organization skills and a joyful, creative disposition. She is a passionate storyteller with published written works by the East Bay Express and NPR. Maria believes different perspectives create a rich creative environment and she prioritizes those values in her creative storytelling and through the hiring of diverse talent and inclusive crews.
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Contact
For inquiries, please contact fiscalsponsorship@filmindependent.org.