“When you first show up in town and say, ‘I want to work in entertainment,’ they tell you to start at an agency,” says Massachusetts-born Bynum.
Instead of studying film, he moved to Los Angeles and got an entry level job at CAA. “It’s the best crash course you can get. I would read a stack of scripts and watch a stack of films every weekend, just so I would have an opinion.”
Studying those scripts inspired original story ideas and eventually the confidence to try writing his 2017 debut, “Hot Summer Nights.”
According to Bynum, “I finished it, put a fake name on it and said, ‘Some buddy of mine wrote this,’” handing it off to a colleague at CAA. “He said, ‘This isn’t half-bad. Who’s your friend?’” The co-worker sent it to former contact Sean McKittrick, who was running Richard Kelly’s company, Darko Entertainment, and before he knew it, Bynum was directing his first film with still-unknown Timothée Chalamet.
“In many ways, ‘Hot Summer Nights’ was my film school, warts and all,” he says. “It was me figuring out how to make movies, because I didn’t go to film school, I didn’t make shorts, I didn’t get to mess up and bury it away.”
Afterward, Bynum says, “I wanted to run as far away from that first movie as I could and tell a story that was much closer to my heart.” He wrote several scripts, including the Sundance-bound “Magazine Dreams,” a portrait of an obsessive, socially awkward bodybuilder, played by Jonathan Majors.
“Anyone who’s obsessive and deeply passionate about what they do is deeply lonely,” he explains. “Here’s someone who has one goal in mind. Where does he put all of that energy?”
Influences: Kelly Reichardt, Andrea Arnold. “I wish I could tell a story that simply and that beautifully with that much compassion.”
Nida Manzoor
Photo : Courtesy Image
“Polite Society”
For years, the industry tried to make Manzoor’s characters a little sadder and a little more miserable. That used to be the way it went, she explains, when you were writing South Asian stories.
“The idea of South Asian women would be, ‘What’s the trauma here?’ It was almost this idea of misery porn,” says the British writer-director.
Manzoor, who is of Pakistani heritage, broke out with the Working Title-produced sitcom “We Are Lady Parts,” which centers on an all-female Muslim punk band. Joyful and edgy in tone, with a hilarious musical backbone, it’s the show South Asians in Britain never dreamed of seeing on U.K. TV screens, which have been slow to diversify.
And yet, it wasn’t an easy sell, and got rejected most places,” Manzoor says. Similarly, “Polite Society,” her feature film debut, took 10 years to get made. It took finding a champion in Working Title co-founder Tim Bevan to open studio doors for the project.
The Focus Features-distributed movie, which screens as part of Sundance’s Midnight section, follows martial artist-in-training Ria Khan who is hell-bent on saving her older sister, Lena, from her impending marriage by pulling off a wedding heist.
“I wanted to explore a relationship between two sisters, and tell that story of sisterly love while using this overarching vessel of an action movie,” says Manzoor, who was keen to use the tropes of action to explore sisterhood and agency for young women.
“I haven’t had many experiences of seeing South Asian women in the cinema,” Manzoor says. “Even now, the main comparison people point to is ‘Bend It Like Beckham.’ And how many years ago was that? It just shows you how we still have a long way to go.”
Influences: John Carpenter, Paul Verhoeven, Sanjay Leela Bhansali
Laurel Parmet
Photo : Courtesy Image
“The Starling Girl”
Parmet may not have been a born director, but she was raised to be one. “I grew up on film sets,” says the daughter of DP Phil Parmet and costume designer Lisa Parmet. “They feel like home to me, where I feel most like myself.”
Still, it took years at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, plus attending the Sundance Institute’s Screenwriters Intensive and creating several shorts that played the fest circuit, before she was ready to write and direct her first feature, “The Starling Girl,” which will premiere in competition at Sundance. The naturalistic tale of a conflicted evangelical Kentucky teen (Eliza Scanlen) who gets involved with her youth pastor (Lewis Pullman) might seem a stretch for the New York-born, Los Angeles-raised Parmet, yet it’s personal.
“When I was in Oklahoma researching a project, I met women in a fundamentalist community who believed their sexual desires were sinful,” she says. “I realized how much we had in common. When I was a teenager, I had a relationship with an older man and had a lot of guilt about it. Spending time with them was a meaningful turning point for me.”
So was meeting her New York University professor and mentor, director Todd Solondz, who along with Sundance Lab partner Catherine Hardwicke inspired Parmet and helped the fledgling helmer find her voice. Most of her works have been coming-of-age dramas, including a screenplay she adapted for “Euphoria” creator Sam Levinson’s shingle, Little Lamb, but she doesn’t want to limit herself to anything.
“I love making films that explore moral ambiguities and complicated people,” Parmet says. “I like to inspire audiences to ask questions rather than provide them with obvious answers.”
Influences: Jane Campion, Miloš Forman
Saim Sadiq
Photo : Courtesy Image
“Joyland”
Born into a military family in Pakistan, Sadiq often felt his style of masculinity was out of step with the norm. Thus, the long-gestating narrative of his nuanced first feature, “Joyland,” became a means of investigating his place as someone who never felt man enough for a patriarchal society. He describes the tale of a timid man secretly joining an erotic dance troupe as a backup dancer and falling for an ambitious trans starlet as an “entirely fictional yet emotionally autobiographical story.”
His undergraduate studies in anthropology also inform the film, particularly in terms of his relationship with the trans community. “There’s an ethos you need to go in with especially if you want to build a lasting relationship,” Sadiq says. “Respect for other people — how they behave and what they do — has to take precedence over what you want it to look like.”
“Darling,” his prize-winning 2019 thesis short from Columbia U.’s MFA program, attracted an international team of producers, offering a proof of concept for the feature with its humanized,
dignified characters. Leveraging the momentum created after “Joyland” won the Queer Palm and a Jury Prize in Un Certain Regard at Cannes, Sadiq hopes to continue an international career. “Right now, I’m based wherever I need to be,” he says.
Before finishing “Joyland,” he penned the original pilot “It Never Rains in Cairo” for MakeReady, with Brad Weston and Scott Silver executive producing. He also finished writing the film adaptation of the the New York Times bestseller “Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet,” which Bing Liu is attached to direct.
Sadiq is fairly certain that his next project will be based out of Pakistan and would follow a similar pattern to “Joyland.” He says, “Bringing money, resources, people and more experienced producers on board, to Pakistan, while working with local talent is easier. Everyone is happier, and there’s something of a safety net.”
Influences: Krzysztof Kieslowski, Paul Thomas Anderson
Jingyi Shao
Photo : Courtesy of Tiffanie Marie
“Chang Can Dunk”
“I never thought I would write a sports film,” says former NYU psychology student turned filmmaker Shao. Perhaps that’s why he created one that feels so different from the Disney+ originals that preceded it with “Chang Can Dunk”: Ostensibly the story of a hoops fan (Bloom Li) who wagers with a classmate on his vertical leap, Shao’s debut feature examines teenage social hierarchies and family dynamics from the perspective of people of color living in communities where they’re a minority population.
“In a town where there aren’t a lot of other Asian American families, sometimes you don’t know why people are treating you a certain way,” Shao says. “That’s why the dunking was so important, because it’s an objective goal — it doesn’t matter how people perceive you or how you perceive yourself. You can or you cannot.”
After enrolling at USC for film school, Shao took a four-year sabbatical in Shanghai to explore its film community and connect with family. “My time abroad really helped solidify the idea that even if I wanted to be Chinese, I’m not. I’m American. I feel like much more of a third culture kid now, and I want to write and tell stories in America.”
With upcoming projects that include a Netflix series he describes as “a Gen-Z ‘Entourage’ with high school basketball stars” and writing the screenplay for a remake of cult action comedy “3 Ninjas,” Shao charts a path to explore adolescent lives with empathy and cultural specificity, including by incorporating the techniques of social media into his filmmaking. “A younger generation that has grown up with the internet have that visual language very much ingrained in the way they perceive and absorb stories. I always wanted to incorporate that into my film, and I think that the younger audience especially would understand it,” he says.
Hollywood 2022: Directors to Watch–Elijah Bynum
Elijah Bynum
“Magazine Dreams”
“When you first show up in town and say, ‘I want to work in entertainment,’ they tell you to start at an agency,” says Massachusetts-born Bynum.
Instead of studying film, he moved to Los Angeles and got an entry level job at CAA. “It’s the best crash course you can get. I would read a stack of scripts and watch a stack of films every weekend, just so I would have an opinion.”
Studying those scripts inspired original story ideas and eventually the confidence to try writing his 2017 debut, “Hot Summer Nights.”
According to Bynum, “I finished it, put a fake name on it and said, ‘Some buddy of mine wrote this,’” handing it off to a colleague at CAA. “He said, ‘This isn’t half-bad. Who’s your friend?’” The co-worker sent it to former contact Sean McKittrick, who was running Richard Kelly’s company, Darko Entertainment, and before he knew it, Bynum was directing his first film with still-unknown Timothée Chalamet.
“In many ways, ‘Hot Summer Nights’ was my film school, warts and all,” he says. “It was me figuring out how to make movies, because I didn’t go to film school, I didn’t make shorts, I didn’t get to mess up and bury it away.”
Afterward, Bynum says, “I wanted to run as far away from that first movie as I could and tell a story that was much closer to my heart.” He wrote several scripts, including the Sundance-bound “Magazine Dreams,” a portrait of an obsessive, socially awkward bodybuilder, played by Jonathan Majors.
“Anyone who’s obsessive and deeply passionate about what they do is deeply lonely,” he explains. “Here’s someone who has one goal in mind. Where does he put all of that energy?”
Influences: Kelly Reichardt, Andrea Arnold. “I wish I could tell a story that simply and that beautifully with that much compassion.”
Nida Manzoor
“Polite Society”
For years, the industry tried to make Manzoor’s characters a little sadder and a little more miserable. That used to be the way it went, she explains, when you were writing South Asian stories.
“The idea of South Asian women would be, ‘What’s the trauma here?’ It was almost this idea of misery porn,” says the British writer-director.
Manzoor, who is of Pakistani heritage, broke out with the Working Title-produced sitcom “We Are Lady Parts,” which centers on an all-female Muslim punk band. Joyful and edgy in tone, with a hilarious musical backbone, it’s the show South Asians in Britain never dreamed of seeing on U.K. TV screens, which have been slow to diversify.
And yet, it wasn’t an easy sell, and got rejected most places,” Manzoor says. Similarly, “Polite Society,” her feature film debut, took 10 years to get made. It took finding a champion in Working Title co-founder Tim Bevan to open studio doors for the project.
The Focus Features-distributed movie, which screens as part of Sundance’s Midnight section, follows martial artist-in-training Ria Khan who is hell-bent on saving her older sister, Lena, from her impending marriage by pulling off a wedding heist.
“I wanted to explore a relationship between two sisters, and tell that story of sisterly love while using this overarching vessel of an action movie,” says Manzoor, who was keen to use the tropes of action to explore sisterhood and agency for young women.
“I haven’t had many experiences of seeing South Asian women in the cinema,” Manzoor says. “Even now, the main comparison people point to is ‘Bend It Like Beckham.’ And how many years ago was that? It just shows you how we still have a long way to go.”
Influences: John Carpenter, Paul Verhoeven, Sanjay Leela Bhansali
Laurel Parmet
“The Starling Girl”
Parmet may not have been a born director, but she was raised to be one. “I grew up on film sets,” says the daughter of DP Phil Parmet and costume designer Lisa Parmet. “They feel like home to me, where I feel most like myself.”
Still, it took years at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, plus attending the Sundance Institute’s Screenwriters Intensive and creating several shorts that played the fest circuit, before she was ready to write and direct her first feature, “The Starling Girl,” which will premiere in competition at Sundance. The naturalistic tale of a conflicted evangelical Kentucky teen (Eliza Scanlen) who gets involved with her youth pastor (Lewis Pullman) might seem a stretch for the New York-born, Los Angeles-raised Parmet, yet it’s personal.
“When I was in Oklahoma researching a project, I met women in a fundamentalist community who believed their sexual desires were sinful,” she says. “I realized how much we had in common. When I was a teenager, I had a relationship with an older man and had a lot of guilt about it. Spending time with them was a meaningful turning point for me.”
So was meeting her New York University professor and mentor, director Todd Solondz, who along with Sundance Lab partner Catherine Hardwicke inspired Parmet and helped the fledgling helmer find her voice. Most of her works have been coming-of-age dramas, including a screenplay she adapted for “Euphoria” creator Sam Levinson’s shingle, Little Lamb, but she doesn’t want to limit herself to anything.
“I love making films that explore moral ambiguities and complicated people,” Parmet says. “I like to inspire audiences to ask questions rather than provide them with obvious answers.”
Influences: Jane Campion, Miloš Forman
Saim Sadiq
“Joyland”
Born into a military family in Pakistan, Sadiq often felt his style of masculinity was out of step with the norm. Thus, the long-gestating narrative of his nuanced first feature, “Joyland,” became a means of investigating his place as someone who never felt man enough for a patriarchal society. He describes the tale of a timid man secretly joining an erotic dance troupe as a backup dancer and falling for an ambitious trans starlet as an “entirely fictional yet emotionally autobiographical story.”
His undergraduate studies in anthropology also inform the film, particularly in terms of his relationship with the trans community. “There’s an ethos you need to go in with especially if you want to build a lasting relationship,” Sadiq says. “Respect for other people — how they behave and what they do — has to take precedence over what you want it to look like.”
“Darling,” his prize-winning 2019 thesis short from Columbia U.’s MFA program, attracted an international team of producers, offering a proof of concept for the feature with its humanized,
dignified characters. Leveraging the momentum created after “Joyland” won the Queer Palm and a Jury Prize in Un Certain Regard at Cannes, Sadiq hopes to continue an international career. “Right now, I’m based wherever I need to be,” he says.
Before finishing “Joyland,” he penned the original pilot “It Never Rains in Cairo” for MakeReady, with Brad Weston and Scott Silver executive producing. He also finished writing the film adaptation of the the New York Times bestseller “Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet,” which Bing Liu is attached to direct.
Sadiq is fairly certain that his next project will be based out of Pakistan and would follow a similar pattern to “Joyland.” He says, “Bringing money, resources, people and more experienced producers on board, to Pakistan, while working with local talent is easier. Everyone is happier, and there’s something of a safety net.”
Influences: Krzysztof Kieslowski, Paul Thomas Anderson
Jingyi Shao
“Chang Can Dunk”
“I never thought I would write a sports film,” says former NYU psychology student turned filmmaker Shao. Perhaps that’s why he created one that feels so different from the Disney+ originals that preceded it with “Chang Can Dunk”: Ostensibly the story of a hoops fan (Bloom Li) who wagers with a classmate on his vertical leap, Shao’s debut feature examines teenage social hierarchies and family dynamics from the perspective of people of color living in communities where they’re a minority population.
“In a town where there aren’t a lot of other Asian American families, sometimes you don’t know why people are treating you a certain way,” Shao says. “That’s why the dunking was so important, because it’s an objective goal — it doesn’t matter how people perceive you or how you perceive yourself. You can or you cannot.”
After enrolling at USC for film school, Shao took a four-year sabbatical in Shanghai to explore its film community and connect with family. “My time abroad really helped solidify the idea that even if I wanted to be Chinese, I’m not. I’m American. I feel like much more of a third culture kid now, and I want to write and tell stories in America.”
With upcoming projects that include a Netflix series he describes as “a Gen-Z ‘Entourage’ with high school basketball stars” and writing the screenplay for a remake of cult action comedy “3 Ninjas,” Shao charts a path to explore adolescent lives with empathy and cultural specificity, including by incorporating the techniques of social media into his filmmaking. “A younger generation that has grown up with the internet have that visual language very much ingrained in the way they perceive and absorb stories. I always wanted to incorporate that into my film, and I think that the younger audience especially would understand it,” he says.
Influences: Ang Lee, Stanley Kubrick