NYWIFT Blog

By Shayna Cartledge

Welcome to NYWIFT, Bella Rieth! 

Bella Rieth is a first-generation Brazilian-German, NYC-based director and producer, and a graduate of the School of Visual Arts who also studied at the Atlantic Acting School Conservatory.

Before film, she trained at the New England Conservatory and performed in theatre internationally, building a life of storytelling that eventually pulled her behind the camera. 

Her recent shorts, including Lottie, Poor Creature, Ebba, and Icaro, have played at festivals from Tokyo to Santa Cruz to Florence. Alongside her own films, Bella produces and field produces across narrative, commercial, music video, and documentary projects throughout New York and beyond. 

Could you give our readers a brief introduction to yourself? 

Hello, my name is Bella Rieth! I am a first-generation Brazilian-German director and producer based in New York. I am drawn to stories about interior lives, the moments people come undone quietly, and the fragile boundary between what we perceive and what is actually real. I believe the most powerful stories live inside the world of a character no one around them can quite see. 

I grew up training at the New England Conservatory while performing in theatre across the United States, Cuba, and Germany, a life of storytelling that eventually led me to film. My most recent short, Lottie, follows a 15-year-old girl in 1973 New England whose obsession with a pizza delivery boy pulls her fragile grip on reality apart. 

What brought you to NYWIFT? 

I was drawn to NYWIFT from the very beginning of my film journey. Every time I searched for resources, community, or a sense of where to find my next collaborators, I kept landing back on NYWIFT. It felt like the place where passionate, talented women were not just gathering to talk about the industry. They were actively building it together, and inviting the next generation in. 

That spirit of collaboration is what I care about most. Filmmaking is a team sport, and finding your people, the ones who show up for your set, read your script honestly, and root for your career the way they root for their own, is everything. Especially right now, as the industry is being reshaped in real time, that kind of community feels essential. NYWIFT is exactly where I want to grow from. 

How has being a first-generation Brazilian-German director shaped your approach to storytelling? 

Being first-generation shaped how I see almost everything. My parents were not artists, but they had traveled and lived all over the world, so museums, famous paintings, and old European buildings were an ordinary part of my childhood. That constant exposure taught me to look for the angle in every room, every corner, every doorway. My parents also spoke about my hometown, Newburyport, Massachusetts, with such reverence for its beauty, and living here now, I see it through the same lens they gave me. A small place full of frames waiting to be composed. 

My German grandmother would take photos of small everyday moments, and I was the one who turned each of them into a scene in my imagination. I would sit with one of her photographs and build a whole movie around it, giving every still image a full life of its own. That habit never left me. The voyeuristic wides, the close attention to the mundane, the insistence that the ordinary is always on the verge of tipping into something else; all of it comes from that early practice of turning a single image into a story. 

Culturally, my storytelling was shaped by both sides of my family. I grew up with my German grandparents’ stories as children of the war, and on the Brazilian side, a deep spiritual inheritance. Those two currents, historical weight and the presence of the unseen, show up in the characters I write and the themes I keep returning to. 

Are there particular themes that you focus on in your work? If so, what pulls you to those themes? 

I am drawn to unraveling. The private fight people put up during their most personal turmoils. So much of my work sits in that in-between space between childhood and adulthood, which was such a tumultuous time in my own life. I keep circling back to questions of perception, being seen as a woman when you are still a child, or being seen as fine when you are quietly falling apart. 

The theme I return to most is miscommunication. It is raw, real, and part of all of our lives. The gap between what we mean and what the other person hears, between how we see ourselves and how we are seen. That theme lives across almost everything I make.

In Poor Creature, a devout young woman tasked with caring for her ailing sister after the loss of their parents begins experiencing something paranormal that no one around her can name. In Ebba, a woman in a dystopian 1950s society is visited by government officials because her body has stopped complying with the state. In Icaro, I stayed with the tender in-between of a young person becoming aware of their own separateness.

The characters I want to write are the ones being misread by the people closest to them, and I want to give the audience the chance to finally see them clearly. 

When I adapt from myths or short stories, I re-envision them, but I keep the original themes and lessons intact. What draws me in is not the plot. It is the misread character underneath it. 

How would you describe your filmmaking style? 

Observational, patient, and quietly unsettled. I make films that hold the frame long enough for the audience to feel like they are intruding on something private, and then slowly warp what they thought they were seeing. Every story tells me its own vision, but I always come back to a voyeuristic perspective. A shot that is held and gorgeous, but slightly wrong underneath. 

I love texture. Handheld Super 8 that pulls you into a character’s subjectivity, voyeuristic wides that push you back out, and the seam between the two where the world starts to bend. I tend to avoid fast-paced cutting. I would rather breathe with a character, sit in a beat longer than feels comfortable, or trap the audience inside a frame with them. The through line, I think, is stillness under pressure. Realism that quietly refuses to stay realistic.

What do you want your overall contribution to be in the entertainment industry? What impact do you want to have/leave? 

I want to contribute stories that take interior lives seriously. Stories about the people who are quietly misread, the ones we look past because their unraveling does not announce itself. So much of what I grew up watching flattened complicated people into decorative or cautionary figures. I want to make films that give the overlooked character the same craft, weight, and moral complexity we have long reserved for the loudest one in the room. 

Beyond the work itself, I want to help build the kind of sets I wish I had walked onto as a young filmmaker: collaborative, generous, rigorous, and safe. If I can leave behind a body of work that meant something to the people who watched it, and a network of collaborators who felt supported and seen along the way, that would be the impact I would be proudest of. 

What has been the most fulfilling project to work on? 

Every project has its memories and moments. Every set, every collaborator, every last-minute save is stitched into who I am as a filmmaker, and I would not trade any of them. But if I had to name one, it would be Lottie. 

Lottie was the culmination of everything I had been building toward: the themes, the visual language, the collaborators, the emotional stakes. Set in 1973 New England, it follows a 15-year-old girl using her Super 8 camera as a lifeline while spiraling into obsession and delusion. It was the film where my aesthetic finally clicked with my thematic obsessions. The small-town frame, the interior life of a character no one around her can quite see, the question of what is real versus what is perceived. 

Watching it travel from Tokyo to Santa Cruz to New York has been incredibly moving, but the part that stays with me is the audiences, especially young viewers, who come up after screenings and tell me they felt seen. That is the thing I will keep chasing. 

Connect with Bella Rieth on Instagram at @a_bella_rieth_film or on her website www.bellarieth.com. 

(All photos courtesy of Bella Rieth)