Zohran Mamdani Documentary in the Works With Over 200 Hours of Footage Chronicling His Rise to Mayor

Filmmaker Julia Bacha has opened up for the first time about her forthcoming documentary on newly elected New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, which began back in 2023 when Mamdani was still campaigning for reelection as a New York State Assemblyman.

In addition to her documentary film work, Bacha serves as the creative director of Just Vision, a non-profit dedicated to storytelling that shines a spotlight on the Israel-Palestine conflict. It was her interest in Israel and Palestine that led Bacha to Mamdani three years ago. The Brazil-born filmmaker heard in 2023 about a group of New York activists who were calling for charities to stop using tax-deductible donations to fund Israeli settlements.

“I learned that they had found, in Zohran Mamdani, someone who was willing to actually introduce legislation,” Bacha told The New Yorker in an interview published Wednesday. At the time, she was interested in making a more “proactive” movie than her previous documentary, 2021’s “Boycott,” which followed three Americans who went to court over state laws restricting one’s ability to protest Israel.

Bacha said that Mamdani was “very open and interested” when she expressed her desire to make a documentary about whether he and his fellow pro-Palestinian lawmakers would be able to hold onto their assembly seats in New York’s next election cycle. She would end up capturing around 200 hours of footage of Mamdani as he climbed his way up New York City’s political ladder.

“He’s the son of a filmmaker,” Bacha explained, referencing Mamdani’s mother, “Mississippi Masala” director Mira Nair. “He’s also a very disciplined person, so I think he felt pretty confident that he could have a camera around.”

As she watched Mamdani relentlessly campaign for himself and his colleagues by going door to door around New York, though, the documentarian began to feel a shift in his plans. “I kept asking him, ‘What’s going on? You’re working really hard. What are your ambitions?” Bacha recalled. ‘He kept saying, ‘No, there’s no ambition. This is just what we do for each other.'”

It was in September 2024 that Mamdani informed Bacha of his intent to run for mayor. That development did not end their collaboration.

Instead, Bacha continued to film at Mamdani’s side over the next two years, including at events attended not only by the future mayor but also by celebrities like Ramy Youssef and high-profile politicians like Bernie Sanders. She continued to film Mamdani all the way through his mayoral inauguration, which Bacha told The New Yorker she believes will serve as the conclusion of her documentary.

Despite Mamdani’s unexpected rise from a little-known state assemblyman, though, Bacha says her subject’s pro-Palestinian views remain a “significant” focus of her documentary. “So many of the attacks that were made against him were around his Palestinian advocacy,” she explained. “That thread continued throughout the mayoral election.”

“Whatever a working person in Astoria deserves, every working person deserves, because our politics is a politics that has no exceptions,” Mamdani reportedly said at a small 2023 event that Bacha attended and filmed for her documentary. “This is a politics that stands in rejection to what I saw as a New Yorker growing up in this city, when I would see politician after politician that I admire proclaim a supposed adherence to the ideas of freedom and liberty and justice, and then draw the line at Palestine.”

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