Why Zohran Matters🗽
The future exists; a brief post-script for the 2025 wind down.
Events & Releases
Thu, Nov 20th, 4:15 PM @ Jengo’s Playhouse, THE LAST PARTERA will be showing during Cucalorus Film Festival!
Followed by Q&A discussion with associate producer Bradley Bethel and amazing midwife Suzanne Wertman, local to Eastern Carolina. We’re sad to miss this special event, but we’ll be in Costa Rica to visit Doña Miriam’s hometown and present the film.
And a big THANK YOU to everyone who has reached out about more community screenings and theatrical/streaming availability of the film— we are working hard to create ways to reach our audience. Please keep in touch by following our instagram and we’ll be posting more ways to get involved soon!
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I felt blessed to be around New York City this week, spending overdue time with family, watching my cousin complete the NYC Marathon, and working with an editor (!) on a film, and celebrating another film. My cousin completed the marathon in 3:30, and we were able to see him multiple times on the race route, which was very fun and very exhausting. It was a bit overpacked, but all in all, great in the right New York ways. Running 26 miles is an insane thing to do, and doing it in a giant, unruly city would give most people pause and yet, it was the largest marathon ever.
The marathon is definitely the best day of the year in New York, seconded maybe by the Thanksgiving Day Parade which is so special to me because of how often our family celebrated that holiday in the city and what it was like to be a little girl in the mix (I have a fond memory of one year seeing both N*Sync and Stevie Wonder in the same parade).
But being there this weekend, I unexpectedly found myself in the center of a hope spiral that was this marathon/Zohran Mamdani weekend, 2025!
Without planning to, we got to witness the ascendancy of now-elected Mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani (I am referring to him as Zohran through this newsletter because I really like his name, which means “light” or “radiance” in Persian)😪. We’ve been following this race for some time, which had literally everything that a New York Mayoral campaign should have: Zohran on subway takes, Zohran eating a lot of street foods, Zohran doing tai chi at an elder gym, Zohran going from Harlem churches to 2 AM dance halls in Brooklyn to campaign. If you followed it with any curiosity, you could feel the momentum — especially since the primary which he won by a landslide.
He’s a young, excited, smart organizer with a lot of hope and a huge smile. He reflects a lot of different groups of people who feel completely invisible. He listens and expresses the needs of people very well. And he makes a lot of establishment politicians very afraid.
Change can happen.
Zohran won over a million votes — more than any candidate in decades. It was a historic win for progressive policies and for the youth of this country. He ran on cost-of-living issues and joyful reflections of a new and hopeful phase for New York City. The night he won, I was also celebrating new governors of Virginia and New Jersey, women leaders who were elected based on their policy promises most of all — and their opposition to the current leadership.
My body had a strange reaction to all the hope - I felt it, then I cried, then I felt afraid. My heart filling up felt at once elating and extremely precarious and frightening. Honestly I thought I might have a panic attack. Why? Because I was feeling positive in a way I have been rebuffed for so many times before. I have built huge walls to protect myself from disappointment. But I allowed myself to feel the hope. To believe that the future exists. That I am going to be in it. That it could be better for all the people we cherish for whom it has been so hard.
I am going to hold onto that.
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