"He was rumpled in the summer heat and wearing a collarless white shirt. Watching nearby were a state senator, Jabari Brisport, in a red Democratic Socialists of America T-shirt, and Diana Moreno, the D.S.A. activist whom Mamdani would eventually endorse to succeed him in his Queens Assembly seat. The event was one of the minor but revealing moments that might have been forgotten, if not for the presence, at Mamdani's shoulder, of Julia Bacha, a documentarian who had just begun following him."
"There was no press on hand that day-"not a single other camera," Bacha recalled recently, while showing me the rough footage in Adobe Premiere. That was often the case, in the two and a half years Bacha spent with Mamdani. She has just begun editing some two hundred hours of material, a process she expects to last for the next four or five months. The result will be her next film: the story of a little-known state assemblyman's path to becoming New York City's mayor."
Julia Bacha began filming Zohran Mamdani in 2023 and followed him for two and a half years, accumulating about two hundred hours of footage. In August 2023 Mamdani launched his reëlection campaign at Sac's Place in Astoria before a very small crowd. The campaign event included exchanges about what working people deserve and featured nearby figures such as state senator Jabari Brisport and D.S.A. activist Diana Moreno, whom Mamdani would later endorse. Bacha has won a Peabody and a Guggenheim and has directed films including Budrus and Naila and the Uprising. Editing is expected to take four to five months.
Read at The New Yorker
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