NYWIFT Blog

By Briana Wilson

Welcome to NYWIFT, Madeleine Rotzler!

Madeleine Rotzler is an Emmy® Award-winning director and producer of documentaries and narrative feature films.

Fiction films include the upcoming O Horizon and O.G., currently on HBO.

Non-fiction films include HBO’s Emmy-nominated It’s a Hard Truth Ain’t It, Emmy-winning Dangerous Acts Starring the Unstable Elements of Belarus, and Oscar-shortlisted The Lottery.

Her most recent film, O Horizon, was described as “bound to be one of the season’s sweetest charmers.” The film premiered at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival in 2025 where it won the Panavision Spirit Award for Independent Cinema. 

O.G., Madeleine’s narrative feature debut, and It’s a Hard Truth Ain’t It were both filmed inside a maximum-security prison in Indiana in collaboration with men incarcerated there. Most of the cast of O.G. were incarcerated. It’s a Hard Truth Ain’t It marked the first time incarcerated directors were nominated for an Emmy.

In our interview, Madeleine discussed her award-winning films and her perspective on the impact of filmmaking.

Welcome to NYWIFT! Could you give our readers a brief introduction to yourself?

My name is Madeleine Rotzler, and I’m a director and writer. I started as an editor, which I loved, and then I began directing documentaries. After making three feature documentaries, I directed my first narrative feature, O.G. (on HBO), starring Jeffrey Wright and Theothus Carter, an incarcerated actor.

Since then, I’ve made another feature documentary and another narrative film, O Horizon, a sci-fi dramedy starring Maria Bakalova and David Strathairn, which will be released in 2026.   

What brought you to NYWIFT?

I’ve always heard such amazing things about NYWIFT and after moving back to NY from LA, I met a wonderful member who recommended me to the organization. I was excited about the community and meeting more people in NY. Also, as a new mom, I really liked the idea of meeting more filmmaking parents.

What drew you to filmmaking after studying psychology and biology? How has that training informed your approach to directing and writing?

I always liked research and getting to know people. I had studied biopsychology in order to do science research, and then by chance created an independent study to make a documentary with a friend my senior year of college.

I absolutely loved editing, and I decided to try to work in post-production. It took a lot of jobs being a PA and a runner, but I was very fortunate to have wonderful mentors and to work as an assistant editor for some phenomenal editors, and ultimately to edit myself. 

I think in a lot of ways, doing research and working in science is very applicable to filmmaking. It’s having a picture of what could be, followed by a ton of long-term planning, problem solving, and flexibility along the way, combined with some amount of obsession. You have to be totally committed to pushing the boulder up the hill.

More literally, my latest fiction film features a young neuroscientist working in a lab with a monkey, which I did myself (very) briefly in college. I always wanted to feature the world of a scientist. We often think of science as being black and white, as determining what is true or false, but I’ve found that scientists can be the most open-minded, the most full of wonder and curiosity about the universe. They recognize that we don’t know much of anything, and find beauty in that.

Madeleine Rotzler on the set of O.G.

What has been the most transformative project you’ve worked on so far, and what made it stand out to you?

Every film changed my life in some meaningful way. Making my first film, The Lottery, I got to know four families in Harlem and the Bronx trying to get their children a good education. One of the five-year-old boys’ fathers was incarcerated, and I visited the prison with him. That’s how I got to see our prison system: through the eyes of a little boy who was so excited to see his dad.

After that experience, I noticed how two-dimensional prison dramas were. They almost all featured the same kinds of characters and tropes. But America has over a million people in prison; you can’t boil that down to one kind of story.

Not only did that family change my understanding of prison, but it also led to two films that I made many years later, O.G. and It’s a Hard Truth Ain’t It.

I’d felt that the stories of people in prison themselves were underrepresented, and I was determined to make a film from inside the prison walls. I was fortunate to be able to do that, and over four years, we partnered with hundreds of men in a maximum security prison, many of whom acted in O.G. and/or directed It’s a Hard Truth Ain’t It, and were nominated for an Emmy.

Dangerous Acts Starring the Unstable Elements of Belarus gave me a window into life in a real dictatorship. We smuggled all of the footage out of the country and the film won an Emmy, which I never expected from a film about a theater group from a little-known country. It reminded me that even a seemingly un-pitch-able story has value and is worth fighting for. It also reminded me why people want to come to our country.

Your films tend to focus on social issues and historically disenfranchised populations. How do you see the role of filmmaking in sparking change?

It’s hard to predict what will spark national or global change. But there is something that I have found is almost always true: bringing people together who wouldn’t normally meet changes those people in some way. 

It’s so easy to stay in our corners, but when people spend some amount of quality time together, their certainty of what they thought they knew about each other can soften. The process of filmmaking is a beautiful opportunity to do that. It doesn’t work 100% of the time, and certainly there can be conflict. I’ve seen that happen too. But the vast majority of the time, it’s effective, and it’s worth going out of our way for. 

And I think that, sometimes, watching a great film can do that too. 

Your most recent film, O Horizon, premiered this year. What are you hoping audiences take away from this story?

O Horizon is about a young neuroscientist who has recently lost her father and discovers a way to talk to him again on the phone. I hope that it is an uplifting and even a fun film. It’s about connection and openness and I hope that it causes people to feel at least a little bit of that.

Looking ahead, what are you excited to explore next in your career journey?

I’m working on an adaptation of a play from the 1980s that I’m very excited about. It’s different from what I’ve done so far – it’s a spy thriller – and it also features a mom.

Mostly, I am looking forward to continuing to make entirely different kinds of films. All of my films so far have been very different from one another. But I hope that I can make films that are entertaining and also have some depth to them.

Learn more about Madeleine Rotzler on her website, www.madeleinerotzler.com.

(All images courtesy of Madeleine Rotzler)