Meet the Bushwick Filmmaker Who Helped Make Mamdani

Anthony DiMieri is the co-founder of Melted Solids, the political video operation that built the visual language of Zohran Mamdani's mayoral campaign. He is also an indie filmmaker, a Balzac obsessive, a holy warrior against vertical video, and the kind of person who keeps a 12-foot Home Depot skeleton at his kitchen table. A 13,000-word conversation about performance artists, polyamory, Dime Square, giallo horror, the cost of living crisis, and keeping the Bushwick dream alive.

Most people who know Anthony DiMieri's work don't know his name. They know the videos. The handheld, two-camera campaign spots that followed Zohran Mamdani through subway cars and onto city buses, interviewing strangers about rent and the fare hike. The shooting style came out of Bushwick. DiMieri developed it co-directing Keep the Meter Running with Kareem Rahma, the creator of Subway Takes: two Sony FX3s, minimal crew, chasing retired taxi drivers around New York.

As co-founder of Melted Solids, the political video production company he runs with Debbie Saslaw, he turned that DIY approach into the visual language that propelled Mamdani from unknown state assemblymember to the youngest mayor of New York City in over a century, the first Muslim and South Asian person to hold the office.

But DiMieri insists his long game is cinema. A Fordham-educated Brooklyn native who learned production at Democracy Now and cut his teeth in the city's indie comedy scene, he spent years saying he was going to make a movie and failing. Then he made one. His debut feature, Love, New York, is a sprawling ensemble dark comedy about dysfunctional dating with nearly 60 speaking roles across three boroughs. It premiered at the Downtown Film Festival in October 2025 to a sold-out crowd.

Yesterday, Alec Meeker met DiMieri at Ange Noir Cafe in Bushwick, a place built like the old Bizarre Bushwick performance space off Myrtle-Broadway, to talk about Balzac, Lina Wertmüller, Dime Square, Erich Fromm, DIY filmmaking on maxed-out credit cards, and why the progressive left finally learned how to make good video.