Lifetime’s The Woman With My Face: Is the Movie Based on a True Story?

Directed by Brittany Goodwin, ‘The Woman With My Face’ follows Anya, a journalist and dedicated single mother who moves to a small town. Given up for adoption at a young age, she shifts to the town to find answers, as its name is written on her birth certificate. However, her new neighbors and the townsfolk repeatedly mistake her for someone called Sarah. When she meets Sarah, Anya discovers that both of them look identical. Furthermore, Sarah was also given up for adoption as a baby, making Anya draw the conclusion that the two of them are identical twins separated at birth. But as the sisters navigate their reunion and peer into their murky past, Anya receives a threatening warning, posing a danger to her family and making her realize that the town hides dark secrets. The Lifetime thriller film narrates a mysterious tale of long-lost sisters reuniting, exploring family secrets and identity.

The Woman With My Face is Inspired by True Events

‘The Woman With My Face’ is a fictional movie penned by Rosy Deacon that takes inspiration from real-life events of twin sisters reuniting after being apart for decades and uncovering their past together. While the Lifetime movie isn’t inspired by any one incident, the reunion story of Amy Khvitia and Ano Sartania in the country of Georgia is by far the most dramatic and one that could have influenced the film. Ano first saw Amy at the age of 12, when the latter was dancing on the national television show, ‘Georgia’s Got Talent.’ Their appearance was so similar that her mother was contacted by friends, who asked why Ano was dancing under a different name. Her mother dismissed it as a coincidence, saying that everyone has a doppelganger. Years later, in November 2021, Ano was sent a TikTok video of a girl who looked exactly like her.

Through her university group, Ano found that it was the same dancer she had seen as a child, Amy. Living 200 miles apart, they connected and were surprised at all the similarities that they had. Both teens were born at the Kirtskhi maternity hospital, but their birth certificates showed that they were born on separate dates with weeks between them. After 19 years apart, Amy and Ano met at a metro station in Tbilisi, Georgia, and felt an immediate connection as they embraced. Discovering that they had the same genetic disorder, dysplasia, they confronted their respective parents and found out that they were adopted and that their birth certificates were altered. Both girls’ adoptive parents explained that they could not have children and were contacted by hospital staff, who told them that they could buy an abandoned baby from them. However, at the time, Georgia had been going through a dark time where thousands of babies were kidnapped from hospitals and sold on a systemic level, involving widespread corruption of government officials, hospitals, and smugglers.

The infants were often sold at a high price, a year’s salary’s worth, which meant that many were bought by families outside Georgia in Canada, the US, Ukraine, and Russia. Ano and Amy’s adoptive parents were unaware that the babies they adopted were stolen. The reunited twin sisters found their birth mother, Aza, through a Facebook group and decided to meet her. Aza lived in Germany with her daughter and embraced her long-lost daughters when she met them. She explained that she had fallen into a coma after giving birth to the twins, and after she awoke, the staff told her that her babies had died. Both ‘The Woman With My Face’ and the true story of Amy Khvitia and Ano Sartania see twins separated at birth, leading parallel lives until a twist of fate reveals their bond.

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