In August of 2023, Zohran Mamdani launched his reëlection campaign for State Assembly at Sac’s Place, a pizza place in Astoria. Beneath bistro lights strung above the restaurant’s back patio, he gave a speech to a crowd so small that his address almost became a conversation.
“So,” Mamdani began, “I wanted to start us off by asking the question, What does a working person deserve?”
“Everything!” one listener piped up.
“Now you’re gonna ruin the whole speech,” Mamdani replied, genially chagrined. “That’s where I’m headed!” 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.
This was not what she had imagined when she first approached Mamdani. Bacha is a New York-based filmmaker whose work, which includes the films “Budrus” and “Naila and the Uprising,” has earned a Peabody and a Guggenheim; she is the creative director of Just Vision, a nonprofit dedicated to storytelling about Israel-Palestine. (“We highlight the efforts of Palestinian and Israeli civilians who are working to end the occupation and secure a free, equal and safe future for all through unarmed means,” the group explains on its website, adding that it does not advocate a specific policy solution to the conflict.) After growing up in Brazil, Bacha went to college at Columbia; she was a student in New York on September 11th, and became interested in Middle Eastern history and politics in its wake. “There was a lot of sympathy for the United States in the immediate aftermath,” she told me. “That was so quickly squandered by the politicians of this country by going into a march of revenge and war.”
Bacha’s last film, “Boycott,” from 2021, tracked three Americans who brought suits to challenge state laws restricting the right to protest Israel. “It was a film about defending the right to speak,” she said—an important subject, but also somewhat abstract. “I wanted the next film to be more of a proactive story.” What did it look like when a person with some power—an elected official, for example—used their right to speak on behalf of Palestinians? What would the public response be? Bacha had seen attitudes shift in the two decades that she’d been making documentaries about the Middle East; in early 2023, for the first time, more Democrats told Gallup that they sympathized with Palestinians than with Israelis. It seemed to her that there was a gap between the way politicians acted and what many constituents wanted. What would happen if someone recognized it?
As Bacha contemplated her next project, she started hearing about a group of New York organizers who wanted to stop charities from 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,” she told me. The proposed Not on Our Dime! act was greeted with an immediate letter of condemnation from twenty-five of Mamdani’s fellow Assembly members, who called the bill “a ploy to demonize Jewish charities with connections to Israel.” In her documentary, Bacha wanted to ask whether Mamdani and his co-sponsors could hold on to their seats in the next election. When she approached him that summer, he was “very open and interested,” she recalled, and he seemed to respect the demands of her process, including her need for independence. “He’s the son of a filmmaker,” she said. “He’s also a very disciplined person, so I think he felt pretty confident that he could have a camera around.”
