The film will feature exterminators, sanitation workers, mobsters, activists, Nobel scientists and historians explaining where rats came from and why they survive.

The project has been in the works since September, when Submarine and Dakota acquired rights at the Toronto Film Festival to Robert Sullivan’s book “Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City’s Most Unwanted Residents.”

Like the book, the film will feature facts about rats, such as their ability to have sex 20 times a day and produce thousands of offspring, along with portraits of city dwellers, exterminators, trash collectors, city officials, scientists, ethnographers, scholars and historians. It will also show most infested areas of NYC and a history of how rats came from London, Norway and Holland on ships.