Anthony DiMieri is the co-founder of Melted Solids, the political video operation that built the visual language of Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign and helped him become the youngest mayor of New York City in over a century and the first Muslim and South Asian person to hold the office. In an interview with Bushwick Daily at Ange Noir Cafe in Bushwick on Wednesday, DiMieri talked about how a decade of DIY filmmaking in this neighborhood produced that style, and what he’s working on next.
The shooting technique came directly out of Bushwick. DiMieri said he developed it co-directing “Keep the Meter Running” with Kareem Rahma, the creator of Subway Takes: two Sony FX3s, minimal crew, moving with subjects through the city. “The handheld, lighter lift, DIY style where you can feel the camera, you can move with it, that’s how we shot,” he said. He argued that the approach that once looked scrappy now looks correct. “If you shot on a gimbal now, that stabilization looks out of place in social media.”
The political work started through a Bushwick connection. DiMieri said he first met a local politician named Rafael at a Bernie Sanders organizing event held in a Bushwick loft in early 2016, organized by the Bushwick Burners, who he described as the only real ground operation for Sanders in New York that cycle. The entire slate of elected officials in New York had endorsed Hillary Clinton; Rafael was, DiMieri said, the only pro-Sanders politician in the state. Years later, he said, Rafael came to DiMieri needing a campaign ad. DiMieri said he had never made one. The indie film crew he assembled for the job evolved into Melted Solids, the political video company he runs with partner Debbie Saslaw.
The style sharpened, DiMieri said, through the Fix the MTA campaign in 2022 and 2023, a push to freeze the subway fare and make buses free. That work developed what DiMieri called the walk-and-talk format, scripted lines broken up by movement through subway cars and onto buses, and alongside it a documentary approach to listening to New Yorkers talk about economic hardship. One early video, he said, captured a woman on the Bx19 bus who agreed to ride with Mamdani and be interviewed. It was just three people: Mamdani, DiMieri, and Saslaw. During a 40-minute ride, the woman said something DiMieri can still quote exactly. “I used to love New York, but now it’s just where I live.” Mamdani used that line at the kickoff of his mayoral campaign and, DiMieri said, again when he won.
DiMieri’s framework for why the format works is that it functions like journalism, with the candidate playing investigative reporter, but only holds up if the candidate has real policy answers to back the questions he is asking. “It will only work as long as the candidate has real solutions,” he said. DiMieri said he and Mamdani tested the model early, going out to interview Trump voters in Queens before Mamdani had identified himself as a mayoral candidate in any of the interviews.
Melted Solids’ first campaign to conclude after Mamdani’s win, DiMieri said, was a New Jersey special election for Analilia Mejia, a progressive populist who ran on the message that both major parties had failed. DiMieri said her willingness to name Democratic failure outright helped her win in a relatively wealthy suburban district.
DiMieri has always run the political work alongside a film career he describes as his long game. His debut feature, “Love, New York,” is a sprawling ensemble dark comedy about dysfunctional dating with nearly 60 speaking roles across three boroughs, he said. DiMieri said it premiered at the Downtown Film Festival in October 2025 to a sold-out crowd. He said he wrote the script in about five weeks after watching Gaspar Noe’s 2021 film “Vortex,” a split-screen study of an elderly couple facing dementia. Noe’s rotating-perspective technique, in which the camera shifts between characters rather than anchoring to one, showed DiMieri how to string together a decade of Bushwick stories about bad dates, polyamory, and dysfunctional couples. “That clicked something in my brain,” he said.
Reading Balzac also influenced him. DiMieri said re-reading Honore de Balzac’s “Lost Illusions,” a novel that functions as a social time capsule of Parisian society in the 1820s, made him think about comprehensiveness as a goal for a New York film. “If you’re going to do a New York film, how can you be as comprehensive as possible to make it feel like now?” he said.
Bushwick is throughout the film. DiMieri said he shot at the Deep End and at Maria Hernandez Park, and cast performance artists he encountered in the neighborhood over the years, including one named Special Head, who he first saw perform a piece involving stage entrails at the Deep End. After the December screening, DiMieri said, Special Head told him he appreciated how much the film featured performance artists.
DiMieri was direct about what the cost of living has done to the creative energy that once defined the neighborhood. “It’s the cost of living crisis. People, it’s hard to live,” he said. He described the performance art scene in Bushwick, and the post-block-party after-parties where he once found a man in his underwear typing a screenplay on a typewriter, as casualties of rising costs. “I’m not saying that we need more people lighting their dicks on fire, but maybe we do need more people lighting their dicks on fire,” he said.
His next film project is a giallo-inspired murder mystery he is calling “The Bloodstained Claws of the Praying Mantis,” about an Italian student in New York who gets entangled in a series of hotel murders connected to a sex club. He described it as an inversion of the classic giallo formula, in which an American abroad is the fish out of water in Italian crime. Marcus Foster, who scored “Love, New York,” is attached, DiMieri said. DiMieri said he is scheduling production around the election calendar, aiming to shoot after either this year’s primary or the November general election.
Featured image: Courtesy bushwickdaily.com
