Movies Afire

Release Year: 2014

Runtime: 141

Language: English

Director: Steven Bernstein

Plot: Based on true events, Decoding Annie Parker is the hopeful and touching story of two remarkable women and their 15-year battle against a cruel and insidious illness, breast cancer. Waged on both scientific and emotional fronts, they are drawn together not just by the disease but by their shared determination and unconventional approaches to their research and to their lives.

Annie Parker (Samantha Morton) has a personal relationship with breast cancer. Her mother and her sister died of the disease and ultimately she is diagnosed with it too. Naturally affable with an offbeat sense of humor – even in the face of her own mortality, she struggles to hold her family and life together, as her body betrays her.

Meanwhile, geneticist Mary-Claire King (Helen Hunt) is convinced there is a link between DNA and cancer – even if no one in her profession shares her belief. Against the advice of nearly all of her colleagues, she persists in her research and her dogged pursuit for funding that will lead to the groundbreaking study that will join the two women together. Decoding Annie Parker follows the incredible, irreverent and heartwarming story of how the paths of cancer survivor Annie Parker and geneticist Mary-Claire King intersect. With grace and humor the film chronicles how these remarkable women work to make one of the most important genetic discoveries of the 20th century.