The New Yorker:

In 2023, Julia Bacha began filming a backbench state assemblyman. Little did she know that she was making a documentary about the next mayor of New York City.

By Molly Fischer

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.

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