Set in Athens, the film follows a Canadian journalist and a queer Afghan refugee whose intense connection quickly becomes much more complicated.
If your watchlist could use another international lesbian romance, Maya & Samar is officially coming to the United States.
The film follows Maya, a Canadian journalist visiting Athens, and Samar, a queer Afghan woman who escaped the Taliban and is building a new life in Greece. The two meet on a dance floor and feel an immediate pull toward each other. What starts as one charged encounter quickly becomes an intense affair between two women whose lives, experiences and relationships to freedom could not be more different.
Nicolette Pearse stars as Maya alongside Amanda Babaei Vieira as Samar. The film was directed by Ukrainian-born Canadian filmmaker Anita Doron, who previously co-wrote the Oscar-nominated animated movie The Breadwinner. Canadian author and screenwriter Tamara Faith Berger wrote the screenplay.
Produced between Canada and Greece, Maya & Samar premiered at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival in November 2025 and was released in Canada earlier this year. Now, Quiver Distribution is bringing it to U.S. audiences on digital platforms beginning September 4.
Why the Film’s NC-17 Rating Matters
Even before its U.S. release, Maya & Samar was already prompting a larger conversation about how intimacy between women is treated onscreen.
The Motion Picture Association gave the film an NC-17 rating for sexual content and graphic nudity. While that does not mean adults are prohibited from seeing it, an NC-17 rating can make a movie substantially harder to advertise, distribute and screen in theaters.
Doron publicly pushed back against the rating, emphasizing that the film portrays intimacy between women as joyful, meaningful and worthy of being shown. Her response speaks to a frustration queer audiences know well: sex between women is often either sanitized for mainstream audiences or presented through a perspective that does not feel like our own. When a filmmaker depicts it more openly, it can quickly be treated as unusually explicit.
Quiver is moving forward with the U.S. release with the rating intact.
When Can You Watch Maya & Samar?
Maya & Samar will be available on digital and video-on-demand platforms in the United States beginning September 4, 2026. A full list of platforms has not yet been announced.
The film does not appear to be offering us a soft, uncomplicated love story. Instead, it places two queer women with profoundly different experiences at the center of something passionate, messy and culturally complicated.
Sometimes that is exactly the kind of lesbian movie we want to watch.
This feels more like EveryQueer because it is still informative, but it speaks directly to queer women without sounding like it is trying to prove its queerness in every paragraph. The NC-17 section also gives readers a reason to care about the rating beyond the controversy itself.
