Sister Directing Duo Talk Faith-Filled Comedy, IDENTITY CRISIS

Published: October 12, 2023

Sister Directing Duo Talk Faith-Filled Comedy, IDENTITY CRISIS

By Cooper Dowd, Movieguide® Staff

Movieguide® Award-winning sisters Andrea Polnaszek and Alexandra Boylan recently teamed up for another faith-filled, family-friendly comedy, IDENTITY CRISIS.

A portion of Movieguide®’s review of IDENTITY CRISIS reads:

IDENTITY CRISIS is a fun, faith-based family comedy on video. It follows a smart but overly shy college girl named Madison. Madison is a bookworm loner who has a crush on a guy named Trevor but feels she’s too bookish to catch his attention. Using an old computer from a 1990s cloning experiment, Madison creates her own clone with the bold confidence Madison lacks. The clone soon overtakes her life, acing her science class, impressing friends, and winning over Trevor. However, can Madison be a better person on her own terms?

Motivated by the lack of family-friendly comedies and wholesome entertainment for young teenagers, the sisters hope that their latest venture will speak into the lives of young girls struggling to find their own identity.

“We always believe in adding the vegetables into the dessert,” Andrea told Movieguide® in a recent interview. “So we just want to make things delightful and really enjoyable for audiences to watch. And then they don’t even realize that they got a lesson or that there was something there that was a deeper truth.”

“I don’t know if people know, but you can’t clone yourself,” she added. “That’s fantasy. But using that as sort of a fun way to maybe disarm our audience and then bring home the bigger message. All of us think, ‘Oh, if I could just perfect that one thing about myself, everything in my life would work out great.’ And that’s not the truth. Hardship is here to stay. It’s part of life. And actually, we need to learn to live with it. And we need to learn to become the most complete versions of ourselves here, even within a lot of brokenness in the world that we live in.”

Whether the topic that they are dealing with on-screen is serious or light-hearted, Alexandra notes that it is their goal to balance moments of sadness with moments of joy.

“If we bring the audience down, we bring them right back up,” she explained. “Our films always have a pretty good mix of comedy and drama, and especially at that age category, 8 to 14 year old girls and boys and their mothers and fathers. We love the Lord. It says the joy of the Lord is our strength. Sometimes Christian movies can be a little bit dark, or have such a heavy subject matter that we just want to bring the joy back. We want you to walk away from our films, feeling uplifted and inspired and excited to go and follow after the Lord.”

The movie, which has a major theme of identity, is a relevant one for teens today who are bombarded on social media with expectations of how they should look and act. Andrea and Alexandra hope to show audiences that Christ is the way to true joy.

“C.S. Lewis says, ‘Comparison is the thief of joy.’ So if we’re always looking at each other and comparing, we never do get that joy,” Andrea said. “In the old days, an identity crisis was when you didn’t know what you wanted to be when you grow up. Now it’s become much more complex, and we just want to reroute and reground ourselves to remember that it’s okay to not know what’s happening next.”

“The whole journey of the story is really Madison, our lead character, thinks that if she can make herself brave and confident and assertive, it’ll solve all of our problems,” she explained. “Well, she ends up sending her clone out to do those things which causes her not to learn how to do them herself and also causes her to miss out on all the fun things the clone ends up doing. And I think that that’s just a great lesson for all of us is that if we’re always waiting or are not stepping in with a yes to these wonderful adventures God has for us, we don’t get to experience any of the amazing blessings that He has for us either.”

Despite levels of science fiction and comedy, IDENTITY CRISIS is based on the truth of scripture.

“Our favorite line that we put in the movie is ‘You’re fearfully and wonderfully made.’ And that comes directly from the Bible, and we really want our audience to know that they are not a mistake,” Alexandra said. “They were created with purpose and they were fearfully and wonderfully made from the beginning. That they are knitted together in the womb, they were created with love. I think we see so much with young girls dealing with social media and all of the pressures that we just want to have our films go out and say, ‘No, no, you are amazing, and you are loved by a Creator, and you don’t have to allow what society is saying, to try to tear you down because God is greater than whatever media is trying to tell young girls.’”

“You don’t have to put your identity in anything else. It starts with, it’s in Christ. If you start there, you can build an amazing foundation for your life,” she continued.

“Hopefully, we are bringing that positive message and that encouraging message to just remind them that God sees them and they’re created in His image,” Andrea added.