Greetings from my one-week trip to sunny Los Angeles!

Back in 2021, I asked an editing mentor for a parting word of advice as we wrapped up a project together. His one thought: take breaks between projects. You can’t do too many of them, back-to-back, or you’ll burn out and start doing worse work. It’s been almost three years since he told me that, and I haven’t had time off between projects since then, so that’s how I’m starting off 2024: focusing on personal projects, tending to my health, indulging in a newfound pottery obsession, and maintaining friendships. I’m available for work but quite content waiting it out until the right project—preferably fiction!—comes along. Here’s what’s been taking up my time and brain space since I last wrote:

My main project over the past year has been editing Lance Oppenheim’s second feature documentary, Spermworld. A road movie of sorts, the film delves into the unregulated online forums where direct-to-consumer sperm donors and hopeful parents connect. In roadside motels, abandoned shopping malls, and suburban bathrooms, these fleeting transactions between strangers give way to tender and vulnerable moments—and the possibility of new life. A neglectful fiancé becomes a father to an unexpected child, a recently divorced older man finds companionship in a young recipient, and a disappointing son seeks validation from his own children—all 150-something of them, and counting.

Reuniting with so much of the team from Lance’s first feature documentary Some Kind of Heaven, plus assistant editor-turned-co-editor Emily Yue, was a treat. This project has gestated for an awfully long time—production began all the way back in December 2020—so I am itching to have it out in the world. It premieres at True/False Film Fest (February 29-March 3) and will be released on small screens on March 29, with a broadcast on FX and streaming on Hulu.

I’ll be attending the Film Independent Spirit Awards as a nominee for Best Editing, for my work on How to Blow Up a Pipeline. For those who have never heard of these awards, this is Hollywood’s awards show devoted to “independent” filmmaking, recognizing films with smaller budgets and limited releases, the kind of work that often gets left out at the Oscars or Golden Globes. If you want to tune in to the show, hosted by Aidy Bryant, it’s on Sunday, February 25 at 2 PT/5 ET. Information on how to watch can be found here.

In March, I’ll be headed back to Los Angeles for the GLAAD Media Awards, recognizing films and other media for their representation of the LGBTQ community. Pipeline was nominated for Outstanding Film - Limited Theatrical Release, alongside some beloved films like Joyland.

The past year has yielded some remarkable films, many of which were not recognized at this year’s awards shows: Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up, Todd Haynes’s May December, Christian Petzold’s Afire, and Ira Sachs’s Passages were particular favorites of mine. The one that has most wormed its way under my skin, however, is Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, a Holocaust film that places the killing off-screen and instead unfolds almost entirely from the perspective of a Nazi commandant’s family living in the shadow of Auschwitz. Zone eschews Nazi caricatures for a sober representation of Commandant Höss’s ambition and bureaucratic innovations; his modern analogue is less tiki torch-bearing alt-righter than McKinsey partner.

There are plenty of reasons the film disappoints some viewers: its chilly gaze and desaturated color palette constantly maintain an emotional distance between audience and character, at times photographed as if by an alien surveyor. The phrase “banality of evil” gets bandied about in discussions of the film, with predictable eye rolls. Sandra Hüller’s performance as the commandant’s wife, one of her two acting tours-de-force in the same release year, is disquieting but too insistent on reassuring the audience that she is unlikable; it might have been more disturbing still, the critique sharper, if the film made it harder to write her off as generally detestable and provided more opportunities for horror at our own moments of identification with someone who, in the next scene, might enjoy luxury goods plundered from the dead.

I am not even confident that I liked the film—I certainly didn’t “enjoy” it—yet the film’s power over me has been undeniable, for admittedly personal reasons related to my upbringing and the moment in October when I watched it at New York Film Festival. What amazes me, as someone who spent nine years at a Jewish school with a robust Holocaust history curriculum, is what the film doesn’t do. Unlike Schindler’s List, The Grey Zone, or the more recent Son of Saul, it refuses to revel in the spectacle of Jewish mass death or to recreate the horrors of death camps for the sake of entertainment. Images of gas chambers and crematoria have potent emotional power, but their prevalence in media is misleading—both oversimplifying Nazis’ methods and reassuring us that, surely, we will know what genocide looks like because it will look like this. “Never again” begins to feel thin—Never again like this. Never again to me. One need only look at modern Germany’s flawed approach to anti-antisemitism to see how the memory of dead Jews can be used as a cudgel against political opponents, including living Jews.

Zone forces us to imagine being the perpetrator. As Israel indiscriminately bombs Gaza, taking tens of thousands of lives and obliterating entire families of civilians, attacking humanitarian workers and journalists, displacing millions, I don’t see how Jewish heritage automatically places me in the position of victim or how grief for Hamas’s victims bestows a license to commit further atrocities on a grander scale. Holocaust remembrance is an invitation to question all narratives that allow us to dehumanize those who don’t look like us; it requires us to imagine the possibility of being on both sides of the gun. In this sense, The Zone of Interest has become entwined with my mourning and outrage in ways Glazer could not have predicted.

I will leave it at that; others have written far more eloquently about the catastrophe unfolding in Gaza, and all I can do is add to the chorus saying, “not in my name.”