WORK
ABOUT
character driven. thematically rich. ELEvATED GENRE STORIES.
A Director known for his passion, work ethic, and warmth, Daniel Lafrentz is an award-winning bi-coastal filmmaker with a potent blend of the art and craft he learned in Los Angeles combined with the flavor he absorbed making his home in New Orleans. Getting involved with his community and exploring the Louisiana countryside is how he developed his gift for creating authentic, lived-in worlds and the working-class underdogs often at the center of his work.
Daniel is currently packaging his second feature film, The Final Word, a cozy mystery with a dash of slash. Set in the faded grandeur of an off-season, antebellum hotel among the Louisiana sugarcane, a celebrated (but currently slumping) Southern Gothic mystery novelist has her writing retreat is upended by a killer determined to inspire her back to greatness.
Daniel is also producing a feature documentary titled Time II Unfinished Business for Fox and Rob Richardson, protagonists of the Oscar-nominated documentary Time (2020). In this poignant sequel to their own saga, Sibil Fox and Robert Richardson return to the battleground of Louisiana’s carceral state to fight for the release of their nephew and co-defendant from the clutches of a merciless system and ultimately discover that the purpose of freedom is to free others.
Recently, the proof-of-concept short for Daniel’s New Orleans-set dad-tective pilot, Saint City, premiered at the Austin Film Festival and Dances With Films. Daniel’s debut feature, a bayou-noir called The Long Shadow, won a Jury Prize at the New Orleans Film Festival where it was acquired by Gravitas Ventures and then released on Showtime. Prior to that, his UCLA MFA thesis, the genre-bending Horror/Western Bleeding, Kansas, won the Hollywood Foreign Press Association Award.
When he’s not practicing and performing with his all-men’s dance team and service club, the 610 Stompers, Daniel tells stories about gentle people fighting to survive in an indifferent, sometimes cruel world, which makes his work a lot like him: a little dark, a little funny, and full of heart.
Want to talk some more? Get in touch.
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SAINT CITY
A sweetheart single dad moonlighting as a neighborhood PI juggles raising a teen boy and protecting his over-the-hill informant as he races across New Orleans to nab the dudebro strangler who killed his friend.
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SAINT CITY is a short film and proof-of-concept for an Hour-Long
PILOT that turns the hard-boiled PI Genre on its head.
see the trailer and more here.
tHE long shadow
A young Sheriff's Deputy in rural Louisiana takes on her town's old money establishment after the woman she loves —
an attorney fighting a rail deal that threatens to displace the town's poor — is murdered.
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My feature film debut, The Long Shadow, premiered at the New Orleans Film Festival
where it WON A Jury Prize.
It was released by Gravitas Ventures and currently has four stars on AMAZON PRIME.
Find your place to watch HERE.
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