Greetings from the flight back from Venice, Italy, where I celebrated my 35th birthday and the premiere of my most recent project as an editor.

That film, Primetime, has dominated my life for the past 18 months: we started filming in March 2025, edited for roughly 12 months, spent a couple more on the finishing process—sound, color, etc.—and had a few months of hiatus time in the middle, when the film still hung over my head. And for most of that time, the film was kept under wraps: all that was publicly announced was that it was the narrative feature debut of accomplished documentary director Lance Oppenheim, starring Robert Pattinson, for the studio A24. Now we have a trailer. We have reviews—94% on Rotten Tomatoes as of this writing. And we have a release date: September 25 in the US. Tickets are on sale.

Taking the film to Venice was gratifying not only because it rewarded many people's months or years of work, but because, for me, it was a full circle moment. In 2011, I spent a summer studying abroad in Venice, consuming a medically alarming amount of gelato and a very goyische amount of Italian Renaissance art, all the while toting around a miniDV camera to capture light reflecting off of the water and onto the peeling paint of buildings along the canals. It seemed profound at the time, I guess. That summer I also wandered the Biennale Arte grounds and had my first encounter with Christian Marclay’s The Clock, a 24-hour film comprising brief excerpts from other films, edited so that the time depicted in the film always matches the time of day in the theater. That film collage was one of my first reference points when I started editing all-archival documentaries after college; 15 years later, I’m still thinking about media collages and still improbably keeping miniDV alive. But this time, I returned to the Biennale as a participant and stood on the red carpet listening to Pattinson fans screaming. Better than the spectacle, though, was the camaraderie: even at great expense, dozens of cast, crew, partners, and friends flew out for the occasion, a testament to the team’s pride in the film and affection for one another.

Since finishing the editing on Primetime, my main focus has been screenwriting. My project, alongside five others, was selected for the Antigravity Academy Screenwriters Camp, a weeklong retreat and ongoing incubation program for emerging writers. If the name makes it sound irreverent or unprofessional, that’s by design; they are quite adamant that this is not a “lab.” The name underplays the amount of work and learning that happened over that week but accurately conveys the amount of fun that I had and the friendships I made with the other participants and organizers.

Because I had apparently not had enough adult summer camp for one year, I also signed up to attend the Sundance Directors Lab as an editor. At the Lab, Fellows workshop scenes from their scripts by staging, shooting, and editing them with extremely limited resources and skeletal crews. Professional actors and often legendary mentors fly in for the occasion, spending up to two weeks in Colorado for the sake of an educational experience that has been a rite of passage for many great filmmakers. I got to work closely with two directors, Said Zagha and Renee Zhan, who had wildly different but extremely compelling projects that I am impatient for them to get made.

During my hiatus from the Primetime edit, I also edited Eliza Callahan’s new short film “The House Call,” world premiering at New York Film Festival on October 7. I can never quite figure out how to describe the piece because it shape-shifts, never going quite where you expect it to. Eliza described it to me at one point as a “mini-epic,” which seems spiritually accurate. Film at Lincoln Center describes it this way: “A veterinarian (Victoria Pedretti) drives through the dark to check on a prized white horse, only to be caught up in the intrigues of its shady owners, and a probing late-night conversation about classical philosophy, modern dance, and the nature of vocation.” Sure!

Eliza’s previous short, “The Non-Actor,” is now available to watch on MUBI worldwide. It became an unlikely viral sensation, somehow rising, at one point, to the most-watched title on MUBI US.

It’s been a big year for many of my friends and mentors, and I want to highlight some really excellent projects that they’ve put out, too.

Thanks for reading!

Daniel