Greetings from Zohran Mamdani’s New York, where my time has been occupied by one project primarily this year: Lance Oppenheim’s debut narrative feature, Primetime, for A24. It’s been a long edit since we started shooting in late February 2025, but we’re getting close and remain every bit as excited about the project as when we began. I’ll attempt to answer the most frequently asked questions:

Beyond my day to day immersion in Primetime world, the past year has also brought a few victories for work that happened in 2024. For one, I was admitted in December of last year to American Cinema Editors, an honorary society that celebrates excellence in film editing, and I’m now permitted (and required) to put the letters “ACE” after my name in film credits. It feels a bit surreal to share this distinction with legendary editors I’ve admired for decades.

“The Non-Actor,” a short film directed by Eliza Callahan that I edited last year, had its world premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) and North American premiere at Toronto International Film Festival, and it landed her a spot on this year’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film list. (While on hiatus from Primetime, I’m also cutting Eliza’s next short, “The House Call.”) The film, adapted from a couple of pages in Eliza’s excellent novel The Hearing Test, follows a young woman as she travels to Los Angeles to seek treatment for her sudden hearing loss. While there, she stays with her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend for a night and tries to make sense of their relationship to each other and her aural relationship to the world.

Predators, David Osit’s insightful and troubling documentary about “To Catch a Predator” and its legacy, premiered at Sundance and ranked second-best documentary of 2025 in IndieWire’s end-of-year poll of 148 critics. I was lucky to be briefly involved as a consultant during the editing process and to watch as David and his talented collaborators made a film that has really worked its way under my skin. I highly recommend watching it on Paramount+ now that it’s available.

Coming up: Isabel Sandoval’s fourth feature film, Moonglow, will premiere at 2026’s IFFR in competition. Isabel has worked hard to earn her auteur status, writing, directing, acting in, and editing her own films. I came in later in the process to contribute to the film’s editing—first giving feedback on a series of rough cuts, then sitting at the controls for a time, and finally tagging along for the sound mix in Taipei last December. The film is her most ambitious work yet, a sensual neo-noir set in Manila in the 1970s, during the Marcos regime. Isabel plays a detective assigned to investigate the burglary of the police chief’s home—a theft she committed, for reasons that are not yet clear. Her assigned partner in the investigation is her ex-lover, the chief’s nephew. The film is beautiful and unlike anything I’ve worked on or seen, and I hope audiences will soon discover this for themselves.

Outside the editing room, I’ve been continuing to write and to hone my ceramics practice. It helps to have multiple creative outlets with projects that unfold on different time scales, providing some cushioning against the bumps that inevitably occur throughout the editing process. Even if a film takes months or years to complete, a pot can be done in a matter of days and can prove its worth immediately in someone’s hands. Ceramics, a craft dating back millennia, also serves as a reminder of how young the art of cinema is, and it brings me some comfort to be tied into a much more deeply established craft with its own deep body of artistic and scientific knowledge. Lately I’ve been focusing on glazes, learning about the chemistry of glaze formulation and the history of some of the most distinctive styles developed by Japanese and Chinese potters in the past thousand or so years. In a time when most films are carefully controlled by streaming services and other corporate interests that can choose to make them vanish for tax purposes or political convenience, and when most newly made work exists only in fragile digital form, it is also strange to imagine that the products of my fiddling around with clay will far outlive anything else I make.

Until next year,

Daniel