NYWIFT Blog

By Linden Standish

Welcome to NYWIFT, Delfine Paolini!

Delfine Paolini is a multifaceted filmmaker whose critically recognized work explores themes of life and loss. Her unique and powerful visions draw from an intimate familiarity of cinematic storytelling, philosophy, and a deeply thoughtful reflection of self.

Her feature debut, A Wonderful Way with Dragons, has won numerous international awards. Its distinct style and emotional evocations are reflective of Delfine’s creative journey. Coming from a background of photography, she is highly attuned to expressive visuals. 

Community and mentorship have remained essential values to Delfine, who has faced both hurdles and victories on her directorial path. 

Delfine’s resolve and creative momentum have led to the development of multiple exciting projects. She is a director to watch; her upcoming films Le Rouge Originel, Reds Hearten, and Sky, Zyprexa, Night will continue to push boundaries and explore the profound power of the film medium. 

In our interview, Delfine discusses her background and inspirations. 

NYWIFT Member Delfine Paolini

Could you give our readers a brief introduction to yourself? 

Hi, my name is Delfine Paolini. I’m a Bronx-based writer, director, and visual artist whose work explores thanatological themes that bind interior life to the external world.

As a teenager immersed in New York’s punk scene, I was drawn to photography, which led me to apprentice with legendary photographer Mick Rock. That period shaped my understanding of image as something intimate and mythic—capable of holding vulnerability, identity, and loss without explanation.

As my focus shifted toward writing, my work was discovered by Johnnie Planco, former Vice President of William Morris Agency, who became an early and essential advocate for my voice. His guidance helped steer me toward becoming a director, and prepared me for my feature debut, A Wonderful Way with Dragons. Following its international recognition, I am now focused on producing my next two films—stories centered on psychologically complex characters, often women, navigating moments of transformation and agency.

What brought you to NYWIFT?

I was drawn to New York Women in Film & Television because it represents a rare space where women filmmakers are supported not only at moments of success, but throughout the long, uncertain process of building a sustainable creative life. As a New York filmmaker whose work has developed outside traditional industry pathways, I have often relied on community, mentorship, and peer exchange to sustain my work as an independent filmmaker. 

NYWIFT’s dedication to advocacy and education strongly resonates with me, especially its support of women telling complex, interior stories with rigor and autonomy. I view NYWIFT not only as a professional organization, but as a cultural community that actively supports women’s creative voices.

Your debut feature A Wonderful Way With Dragons has won dozens of international awards. What advice would you give to others who are working on their first directorial features? 

For first-time filmmakers, preparation requires endurance and resolve as much as organization.

Before stepping onto set, it is important to know your film intimately—its color palette, the images envisioned for each scene, the sound design imagined long before post-production begins. That intimacy extends beyond aesthetics to emotional understanding: writing from lived experience, not as autobiography, but as emotional truth. When a film is grounded in what the filmmaker knows deeply—memory, hardship, loss, or longing—those choices become stabilizing forces as circumstances inevitably shift.

Equally vital are the practical foundations: a trusted production team capable of absorbing logistical strain, reliable hard drives, secure backup systems, and contingency plans for unideal weather. Without these supports, the pressure can wear down even the most focused director.

It is also important to acknowledge that, given the number of variables involved, setbacks are inevitable, and effective directing requires flexibility and a willingness to adapt. This reality is often intensified for women filmmakers. Research on workplace bias suggests that women in leadership roles are frequently evaluated more harshly for perceived emotional fluctuations, even when those moments are minor or situational. In such environments, maintaining trust on set becomes especially critical, as uncertainty can quickly undermine collective focus and confidence in the director’s leadership.

Another reality worth acknowledging is that a film’s budget is rarely fixed, and shifts in financing often force difficult decisions about what is essential to preserve and what must be relinquished for the sake of completion. In our case, despite having a capable line producer, unforeseen events meant that, in order to finish production, we entered post-production without a budget. At that point, I recognized only two viable paths: abandon the film under untenable circumstances, or move forward knowingly, without guarantees, and find a way to complete it. I chose the latter—not out of bravery, but out of necessity—and in doing so placed myself in a precarious position. Within American independent filmmaking, the lack of structural support frequently creates such no-win scenarios, in which filmmakers are forced either to exceed reasonable personal limits or to walk away from work developed over many years.

To ensure that A Wonderful Way with Dragons could be completed, I worked across multiple departments—teaching myself Pro Tools to edit dialogue, collaborating closely on the cut while our editor worked remotely from Egypt, and overseeing post-production workflows myself. I independently drafted contracts, spent thousands of dollars on software, and ultimately surrendered all of my remaining backend points to secure access to a post-production studio.

That is why the film feels something like a miracle to me—the strain I carried a year earlier had felt impossible to overcome. As the film began to receive recognition, what mattered most to me was that the care and commitment behind it were felt.

This experience made clear how increasingly difficult it is to complete thoughtful, arthouse films in the United States, particularly for women. Too many voices are lost not because of a lack of talent or vision, but because the economic barriers prove insurmountable. Other countries recognize cinema as a cultural good worthy of public investment. If film is to remain a shared language—one that shapes how we understand ourselves and one another—then the artists who create it must be supported accordingly.

What kinds of stories are you compelled to write?

From an early age, philosophy shaped my short stories and poetry, particularly the work of Lucius Annaeus Seneca. Seneca’s tragedy Hercules Furens uniquely portrays the figure of a consciousness displaced from the world it once recognized. Hercules’ question —“Where am I? Under the rising of the sun or beneath the wheeling course of the frozen bear?”— articulates a state of profound epistemic rupture: a subject surviving catastrophe without coordinates. That condition mirrors the emotional logic of my work, in which characters must navigate interior devastation without the promise of clarity or return.

Much of my work emerges from an early familiarity with instability, loss, and emotional silence, and from an impulse to observe rather than explain. I’m compelled by characters—often women—who are navigating transformation not through grand gestures, but through restraint, endurance, and private reckoning.

Formally, I am interested in how images can carry what language cannot—how space, light, duration, and stillness reveal psychological truth. I am drawn to painters like Edward Hopper, whose work captures isolation and longing without sentimentality, and to filmmakers like Terrence Malick, who trust the audience to inhabit ambiguity. The stories I write privilege atmosphere over exposition, allowing memory, grief, and desire to surface indirectly.

Is there a piece of media that continuously inspires you? 

There are several works I return to repeatedly, but they are bound by a shared understanding of image as an emotional language. As a child, my grandmother made me watch foreign films without subtitles. When I asked why, she told me that the image should carry everything—that language should only deepen what is already felt. That lesson has remained foundational to my practice.

I return often to the work of Krzysztof Kieslowski, particularly Three Colors Trilogy and The Double Life of Véronique, for their ability to render interior life through color, rhythm, and silence. Similarly, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror remains essential to me for the way memory fractures and reconstitutes itself without explanation—how time, grief, and childhood coexist in the same emotional space.

I am equally drawn to filmmakers who locate interiority within the physical body and landscape. Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher has been especially influential in its use of restraint—how violence, neglect, and tenderness are conveyed through texture, sound, and absence rather than narrative declaration. Likewise, Andrea Arnold’s Fish Tank continues to inform my work for its raw intimacy and moral clarity, allowing character psychology to emerge organically through movement, environment, and gaze.

In shaping my upcoming international feature Reds Hearten, I have also been influenced by the moral and psychological rigor of Jacques Audiard’s Un prophète, particularly in its attention to interior transformation and consequence. 

These works continue to inspire me because they trust the audience to feel—to inhabit uncertainty, memory, and loss—without instruction. That trust is at the core of my own artistic approach.

Your work has a distinct visual tone: beautiful, haunting, ethereal… Is this something that came natural to you, or did you search for it?

While craft and intention continue to refine my work, the visual language itself was never constructed; the images arrive not because I seek beauty, but because beauty is the only way I know to express our capacity to endure loss and despair—the burden of continuing in their aftermath. As Wordsworth writes, “A timely utterance gave that thought relief, and I again am strong”—a reminder of language’s capacity to steady the interior life. If beauty exists in my work, it emerges only through engagement with what must be endured..

This sensibility was present in my debut feature A Wonderful Way with Dragons, which was shaped by dark fairy tales, such as J M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl, and most powerfully The Shadow. These stories understand that innocence and terror coexist, that wonder is never without consequence, and that loss is often the price of imagination.

Translating A Wonderful Way with Dragons from page to screen was possible only through my collaboration with Abdelsalam Moussa, the film’s internationally recognized cinematographer. Our work together is grounded in a deep emotional and artistic intuition. While interviewing cinematographers for my debut, Moussa—an Egyptian filmmaker based in Cairo—immediately understood that I was telling a story closer in spirit to Peter Pan than Lord of the Flies. No other English-speaking cinematographer articulated that distinction, and it revealed the depth of his perception.

Although he could have chosen any number of higher-paying projects, Abdelsalam chose to shoot my super-independent, low budget film, returning his salary to the production because he believed in the story. Without him, I would not have been able to visualize the script with the clarity and emotional depth we ultimately achieved.

What are you working on currently, or hope to work on in the future?

I am currently in pre-production on Le Rouge Originel, a feature-length prequel to my forthcoming international film Reds Hearten. The project deepens my ongoing exploration of thanatological themes and interior life through an observational, restrained cinematic language. Conceived as the mythic and moral foundation beneath Reds Hearten, Le Rouge Originel is structured around proximity, duration, and the quiet conditions through which violence becomes procedural rather than exceptional. It represents a rigorous narrowing of my formal and ethical focus, and is the work I am most actively preparing at this moment.

In parallel, I continue development on Reds Hearten, a psychologically and philosophically driven feature set within a purgatorial space. The film examines corporeal romance, guilt, and the persistence of desire in the aftermath of irreversible loss. Conceived as an international co-production, it expands my interest in suspended moral and temporal states—where love endures without the promise of redemption.

I am also in pre-production on Sky, Zyprexa, Night, a 1993-set psychological drama rooted in faith, adolescence, and intergenerational mental illness. The project reflects my commitment to long-term creative collaboration, with a cast that includes Casey Likes, Jacob Moran, and returning collaborators Taylor Geare and Donnie Masihi from my debut feature.

Across all of these projects, my work remains unified by a sustained investigation into interior life, duration, and moral pressure—stories that resist resolution and ask how individuals endure once meaning, certainty, or redemption are no longer guaranteed.

Connect with Delfine Paolini on Instagram at @delfinepaolini, and check out @skyzyprexanight for news and info on her upcoming film, Sky, Zyprexa, Night.

(All photos courtesy of Julia Gillard; find her on Instagram @juliagillard777)