Zazie Ray-Trapido

Directing

Zazie Ray-Trapido

Zazie Ray-Trapido is a filmmaker and producer based in Los Angeles. Her films expand on traditional documentary and narrative formats, engaging with analog film techniques, archives, and performance. Her practice investigates relationships between memory, ideology, and the environment. Her work has been screened at festivals and venues worldwide, including the New York Film Festival, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Viennale, RIDM, Kasseler Dokfest, Glasgow Short Film Festival, Curtas Vila do Conde, Oberhausen, Kurzfilm Festival Hamburg, ICDOCS, and Maysles Documentary Center, among others. She holds a BFA from Bard College and an MFA in Film/Video from the California Institute of the Arts.

Acting credits

A Call to Spy poster
6.7

The story of Vera Atkins, a crafty spy recruiter, and two of the first women she selects for Churchill's "secret army": Virginia Hall, a daring American undaunted by a disability and Noor Inayat Khan, a pacifist. These civilian women form an unlikely sisterhood while entangled in dangerous missions to turn the tide of the war.

A Call to Spy

2020

Radium Girls poster
6.6

Young women toiling in a factory are exposed to hazardous material which takes a disastrous toll on their health.

Radium Girls

2020

Treasure Hunt poster
NR

In search of a mysterious treasure, three women embark on an adventure through magical and playful vignettes.

Treasure Hunt

2022

Nona poster
2.0

Dr. Eva Ray is 90 years old. She lives in a house by herself outside of Philadelphia. Born in former Yugoslavia, her family fled the Nazis and settled in New York. As a biochemist she worked for NASA and retired in her late 50's. She got divorced after 40 years of marriage and spent her time volunteering in local politics. After many years of independence and freedom, she now feels a deep sense of restlessness and finds herself at a significant turning point. Weaving through her memory and her present, she asks herself what she will do next in what she calls her "final chapter."

Nona

2022

Playdate poster
NR

Playdate consists of surreal and performative reimaginings of the simple and naive games played throughout childhood.

Playdate

2021

Travelers' Suite poster
NR

Forms of the universe, rocky landscapes, and a green and lush human-made city. It originates from a dream I had; it is both mine and from a traveler aboard a spaceship. The dream and traveler belong within the universe of my film Fractais Tropicais. Here, the hopeful and utopian human-centric imaginary of space travel and the future, filled with surveillance, control, and illusions, all fleeting like the images a dream can contain.

Travelers' Suite

2026

If a Tree Falls in a Forest poster
NR

Set in the landscapes of Los Angeles, this hybrid documentary seeks to explore harmful cyclical occurrences that exploit natural resources and bring us closer to extinction. Following the discovery of a mysterious metal structure in the desert, this film documents the encased objects found within the structure. This film is made up of speculative recreations of the study conducted, analysis of the found objects, and surrounding landscapes.

If a Tree Falls in a Forest

2021

When We Encounter the World poster
6.0

In 1934 an experiment by an amateur-scientist couple began. Named after a genus of moths, the Automeris Project placed a group of young children in an enclosed forest, leaving them to fend for themselves. On return visits, the couple presented self-made films, accompanied by live music, depicting the outside world. For them, these images were the perfect replica of reality seen in their expeditions. Nevertheless, the films were carefully framed, edited, and manipulated to induce a transformation and provoke the development of a new society.

When We Encounter the World

2024

Behind the camera

Treasure Hunt poster
NR

In search of a mysterious treasure, three women embark on an adventure through magical and playful vignettes.

Treasure Hunt

2022

Nona poster
2.0

Dr. Eva Ray is 90 years old. She lives in a house by herself outside of Philadelphia. Born in former Yugoslavia, her family fled the Nazis and settled in New York. As a biochemist she worked for NASA and retired in her late 50's. She got divorced after 40 years of marriage and spent her time volunteering in local politics. After many years of independence and freedom, she now feels a deep sense of restlessness and finds herself at a significant turning point. Weaving through her memory and her present, she asks herself what she will do next in what she calls her "final chapter."

Nona

2022

No artwork available
NR

A mysterious encounter in the middle of the forest that continues to repeat itself day after day, endlessly. An infusion like that of a labyrinth of the mind: strange, cyclical events intermingle with novels, short stories, and history, as if in intervals between naps, dreams, and readings during a nameless narrator's period of solitude in a cabin in the woods.

Forking Paths

Playdate poster
NR

Playdate consists of surreal and performative reimaginings of the simple and naive games played throughout childhood.

Playdate

2021

Language Decay poster
NR

Days spent by the filmmaker with her grandmother are captured on a broken camera and three rolls of film. The celluloid decays along with speech in a language foreign to Zazie.

Language Decay

2025

Language Decay poster
NR

Days spent by the filmmaker with her grandmother are captured on a broken camera and three rolls of film. The celluloid decays along with speech in a language foreign to Zazie.

Language Decay

2025

The Instability of Clouds poster
NR

Two neighbors bond after a shared traumatic event, a continuous home development creeps into nature's threshold, and a community celebrates freedom. The Instability of Clouds navigates an ecosystem in decay and growth while traversing across its spaces of comfort, spectacle, and disaster. Through the observation and construction of facets within a suburban neighborhood in Southern California, connections between landscape, neighbors, and environment ruminate on the American Dream and its resonances.

The Instability of Clouds

2024

The Instability of Clouds poster
NR

Two neighbors bond after a shared traumatic event, a continuous home development creeps into nature's threshold, and a community celebrates freedom. The Instability of Clouds navigates an ecosystem in decay and growth while traversing across its spaces of comfort, spectacle, and disaster. Through the observation and construction of facets within a suburban neighborhood in Southern California, connections between landscape, neighbors, and environment ruminate on the American Dream and its resonances.

The Instability of Clouds

2024

When We Encounter the World poster
6.0

In 1934 an experiment by an amateur-scientist couple began. Named after a genus of moths, the Automeris Project placed a group of young children in an enclosed forest, leaving them to fend for themselves. On return visits, the couple presented self-made films, accompanied by live music, depicting the outside world. For them, these images were the perfect replica of reality seen in their expeditions. Nevertheless, the films were carefully framed, edited, and manipulated to induce a transformation and provoke the development of a new society.

When We Encounter the World

2024

When We Encounter the World poster
6.0

In 1934 an experiment by an amateur-scientist couple began. Named after a genus of moths, the Automeris Project placed a group of young children in an enclosed forest, leaving them to fend for themselves. On return visits, the couple presented self-made films, accompanied by live music, depicting the outside world. For them, these images were the perfect replica of reality seen in their expeditions. Nevertheless, the films were carefully framed, edited, and manipulated to induce a transformation and provoke the development of a new society.

When We Encounter the World

2024

When We Encounter the World poster
6.0

In 1934 an experiment by an amateur-scientist couple began. Named after a genus of moths, the Automeris Project placed a group of young children in an enclosed forest, leaving them to fend for themselves. On return visits, the couple presented self-made films, accompanied by live music, depicting the outside world. For them, these images were the perfect replica of reality seen in their expeditions. Nevertheless, the films were carefully framed, edited, and manipulated to induce a transformation and provoke the development of a new society.

When We Encounter the World

2024

Survival Without Rent poster
NR

During the 1980s, there were hundreds of abandoned houses in New York that their owners were unable to maintain. They were taken over by squatters, who used their own hands to build homes, but also a utopian community, based on anti-capitalist principles. Archival footage and testimonies map their story, until their forced eviction in the 1990s. “Survival without rent: This is a book to help people take back homes that have been taken away from them by government and business.”

Survival Without Rent

2025