NEW YORK: Blue Ivy is about to become a big sister — twice over.
Beyonce and Jay Z announced Wednesday on Instagram that the superstar singer is pregnant with twins.
“We have been blessed two times over. We are incredibly grateful that our family will be growing by two,” said a statement signed “The Carters,” Jay Z’s real last name.
The news accompanied a photo of Beyonce showing a baby bump while wearing just a bra, underwear and a veil, kneeling in front of a backdrop of flowers. The singer’s representative did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The news triggered half a million tweets in 45 minutes, according to Twitter.
Their daughter, Blue Ivy, was born in 2012. The little girl served as the inspiration for Jay Z’s hit song “Glory,” and she’s appeared in music videos alongside her mother.
Beyonce, who set a record in December for earning Grammy Award nominations in the rock, pop, R&B and rap categories in the same year with her diverse album “Lemonade,” announced her last pregnancy at the 2011 MTV VMAs.
Beyonce in October ended her six-month Formation World Tour at MetLife Stadium in New York City. She has also been named one of the headliners this spring at the Coachella music festival.
Beyonce and Jay Z routinely make listings of the most powerful people in the entertainment industry. She is the most nominated woman in Grammy Awards history, with 53 nominations and 20 wins. He co-founded the record company Roc-A-Fella, the clothing line Rocawear, a nightclub chain and the streaming service Tidal.
She and Jay Z were married in April 2008. Beyonce revealed in 2013 that she had suffered a miscarriage before Blue Ivy’s birth.
In 2013, Beyonce told ABC News that she definitely “would like more children.”
“I think my daughter needs some company. I definitely love being a big sister,” she said, referring to little sister, Grammy-nominated singer Solange Knowles.
The news of the pregnancy comes a day after Pharrell Williams and his wife, Helen Lasichanh, confirmed they had welcomed triplets. Those babies join 8-year-old big brother Rocket.
Beyonce announces she’s pregnant with twins on Instagram
Beyonce announces she’s pregnant with twins on Instagram
‘One in a Million’: Syrian refugee tale wows Sundance
PARK CITY: As a million Syrians fled their country's devastating civil war in 2015, directors Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes headed to Turkey where they would meet a young girl who encapsulated the contradictions of this enormous migration.
In Ismir, they met Isra'a, a then-11-year-old girl whose family had left Aleppo as bombs rained down on the city, and who would become the subject of their documentary "One In A Million," which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday.
For the next ten years, they followed her and her family's travels through Europe, towards Germany and a new life, where the opportunities and the challenges would almost tear her family apart.
There was "something about Isra'a that sort of felt to us like it encapsulated everything about what was happening there," MacInnes told an audience at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah on Friday.
"The obvious vulnerability of her situation, especially as being a child going through this, but that at the same time, she was an agent.
"She wasn't sitting back, waiting for other people to save her. She was trying to fight, make her own way there."
The documentary mixes fly-on-the-wall footage with sit-down interviews that reveal Isra'a's changing relationship with Germany, with her religion, and with her father.
It is this evolution between father and daughter that provides the emotional backbone to the film, and through which tensions play out over their new-found freedoms in Europe -- something her father struggles to adjust to.
Isra'a, who by the end of the film is a married mother living in Germany, said watching her life on film in the Park City theatre was "beautiful."
And having documentarists follow her every step of the way as she grew had its upsides.
"I felt like this was something very special," she told the audience after the screening. "My friends thought I was famous; it made making friends easier and faster."
