Lalita Clozel & Ariane Mohseni-Sadjadi
Authors and filmmakers
September-November 2026
- Cinema
- Chicago
“In a constant formal exploration, we bring the intimate into the design and creative process, weaving a bond of trust that goes beyond the artwork and allows those we work with to reclaim both the filmmaking process and their own image.”
Our friendship began in high school. We skipped classes to chain together movie screenings in the Latin Quarter or settle into PMU cafés, listening to stories that opened up new horizons for us. This was the prologue to our future collaboration.
Seven years later, we embarked on directing our first feature-length documentary, without prior training, equipment, or producer, but with a clear commitment to intertwine the intimate and the political in a horizontal approach. From our nearly five-year immersion in the daily lives of three women experiencing homelessness, our first film was born: Homelessly in Love, which will be released in cinemas on November 26, 2025. Using the universal lens of love, we sought, together with them, to subvert prejudices and enable a redemptive identification for viewers, countering the miserabilist representations so often perpetuated by the media. This shoot felt completely natural for us: we had never felt more in our place than in the role of directors.
United by shared commitments, a radical openness to others, and a desire to give voice and power to society’s forgotten, we developed our working method through practice. In a constant formal exploration, we bring the intimate into the design and creative process. Whether working with crack users, undocumented workers, or activists against police violence, we spend months, sometimes years, immersed with our protagonists, weaving a bond of trust that goes beyond the artwork and allows those we accompany to reclaim the filmmaking process—and through it, their own image.
Lalita Clozel comes from print journalism. French-American, she has been published in the New York Times and The Washington Post, and worked as a financial journalist for The Wall Street Journal in Washington, D.C. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, she attended the editing workshop at Atelier Varan in 2021.
Ariane Mohseni-Sadjadi, a graduate of HEC Paris, left her career as a trader in London to devote herself to directing Homelessly in Love. She holds a master’s degree in documentary filmmaking from INA–ENS Cachan–École Nationale des Chartes and now works on socially engaged projects through an immersive and creative approach. She has also taught sociology at the University of Rouen.
Together, they co-directed Homelessly in Love, a feature-length documentary awarded the Audience Prize at the Escales Documentaires de La Rochelle and Best Feature Documentary in Dallas, selected as a Market Exclusive at Dok Leipzig and in the international competition at MyFirstDoc in Tunis. Homelessly in Love will be released in theaters in November. They then co-directed and produced JO 2024: le combat des ouvriers sans-papiers, released in June 2024 on Arte. In 2024–2025, they are participating in the serial writing residencies at La Fémis and Groupe Ouest for the series in development No Go Zone.
Michelle, the protagonist of our first feature film, opened the doors to another America for us. Wandering from shelters for battered women to emergency housing to escape a violent husband, she took us from Hopewell, Virginia, to Youngstown, Ohio, from Saint Joseph to Chillicothe, and finally to Trenton, Missouri. We discovered deserted streets, boarded-up mansions, and ruined factories, and long lines outside Salvation Army buildings. Then Michelle’s new partner found a job on a revolver stock assembly line. For us, this was our introduction to these surviving workers, proud of their jobs, spending their evenings between the few pubs still open and trailer park cookouts. Their lives, shaped by successive factory closures, echoed a reality that felt very familiar from France. On Saturdays spent marching and occupying roundabouts with the Yellow Vests, we heard the same stories: jobs rendered obsolete, lives halted in indifference.
In the chasm that has grown between those who belong to the globalized economy and those who no longer do, a new political reality has emerged: voters who want to revive industry to regain the jobs of the past—a theme found both in the National Rally in France and with Donald Trump. Whether or not these discourses are followed by action, they have spread across the West, creating a powerful political network in resonance with rampant deindustrialization and riding on nationalism.
With Désindustries (Discontinued), we aim to capture the dizzying scale of deindustrialization in medium-sized towns in France and the United States, sharing the experience of recent or ongoing factory closures and the nostalgia for a bygone golden age. By following the daily lives of workers rooted in their cities, we will also explore the role of communal spaces—a crucial factor for the survival of a territory: taverns, bars with tobacco and betting services, and the like—even as these spaces empty with the seasons and successive factory closures.
“She was full of life, our little community, wasn’t she?” reads a caption under a historical video of Trenton.
It was important for us to situate our work in a territory with a rich past and an economy still dependent on industrial employment, in order to speak in the present about a reality that might seem outdated from North American coasts or European capitals. This choice also allows us to explore a broader political dynamic in the West that is not always understood from places where the worker has become a marginalized figure, often excluded from factories converted into coffee shops or pop-up art galleries. Conversely, in small and medium-sized towns of the Rust Belt—from Youngstown, Ohio to St. Joseph, Missouri—countless museums preserve the memory of industrial production and the lifestyles of the past.
Trenton is a town of 5,622 inhabitants in rural Missouri, where Amish horse-drawn buggies coexist with futuristic tornado-chasing vehicles. Yet a quarter of its jobs are still in industry. With its old water towers, century-old brick houses, and the Grundy County Museum filled with Coca-Cola bottles, factory tools, and precise reconstructions of a General Store from the Gilded Age, Trenton is both cinematically and narratively emblematic of a shared history.
The town was originally known for inventing a cooking process that allowed large quantities of sausages to be canned for truck drivers, and it has recently been marked by the successive buyouts of two of its three factories. Politically, this uncertainty about the future is palpable. After supporting Bill Clinton in 1996, the town voted 81% in favor of Donald Trump in the last election.
