Anastasia

1928. Despite the official records stating that all of Russian Tsar Nicholas and Tsarina Alexandra’s children were executed along with them in 1918 during the revolution, rumors have abounded that the youngest daughter, the Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna, managed to escape and is thus still alive. As such, a £10 million inheritance has been kept for her in the Bank of England. With this fact in mind, Sergei Bounine, a former Russian general in the Tsar’s army and now a Parisian restaurateur, and two of his Russian associates, Boris Chernov and Piotr Petrovin, have long hatched a plan to access that money: find a young woman to impersonate Anastasia. Bounine thinks he’s found the perfect woman when another of his associates spots someone on the streets of Paris who has more than a passing resemblance to what most people probably believe Anastasia would look like. She also has some remarkable characteristics similar to Anastasia. The issue with this woman is that she is an amnesiac, and is despondent over that fact. She is a willing participant more so truly to discover who she is, Anastasia or not. In that alternate life so that she can move around easily, they rechristen her Anna Koreff. In accessing that £10 million, they will have not only to convince Prince Paul von Haraldberg, who was once engaged to Anastasia, but more importantly Anastasia’s grandmother, the Dowager Empress, who has had many an “Anastasia” paraded in front of her in the intervening ten years. As Bounine and Anna progress with transforming her into Anastasia for the world to see, they may come to reach different motivations than the ones they began with.