How Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia (Co- Directors) met:

They first crossed paths in a bookstore in San Antonio, Texas in 2000. Daniel is from San Antonio, and Rania, from Tripoli, Lebanon, found herself in that far away land called Texas for University. They talked briefly and discovered a mutual interest in film. Then Daniel ate some of Rania’s ice cream without asking, and they parted ways. Some weeks later, they found themselves in the same drawing class at the University of Texas at San Antonio, and a strange friendship began to appear. One night over dinner, they decided to make a short film together, and ever since then, they’ve just never stopped.

How Rania Attieh and Daniel Garcia met Shruti Ganguly & Pierce Varous (Co-Producers):
In 2003 Daniel and Rania moved to New York City after Rania took part in an exchange program with Hunter College in Manhattan. While taking classes there, Rania met and became friends with Pierce Varous, a classmate of hers, and Pierce eventually asked Rania to shoot the film he was working on at the time. Daniel was the assistant camera. After undergrad they lost track of each other.

Meanwhile, Daniel was accepted to and attended NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts Graduate Film program, and Rania and Daniel continued to make films and art together. Years later, in 2011, after making their first feature film, ‘OK, Enough, Goodbye’, Rania and Daniel screened their film for a class of students at NYU. In the audience at this screening was Shruti Ganguly, who was a Producing student in the school. After the screening, they all found themselves at dinner together, and the three of them struck a chord with each other, and promised to keep in touch and to eventually work on a project together.

Around this time, Pierce had also heard of Rania & Daniel’s feature so he reached out to them explaining that since they had last seen each other, he had built a post-production facility Nice Dissolve from the ground up out of a space in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where Rania and Daniel also live, and that he had been post-producing many award winning films. He mentioned he would be interested in talking about projects the three of them might be able to work on together. Rania and Daniel then met with Pierce over a few afternoon beers in the early spring of this year, where they outlined the beginnings of an idea that would become ‘H.’ Pierce immediately jumped on board.

Not too long after, Rania and Daniel met with Shruti. She has at that point produced two features with James Franco. They discussed with her the new untitled project they were working on set in upstate New York, in a town called Troy. Shruti was instantly taken by the idea, and the fact that she knew Pierce Varous and was familiar with Nice Dissolve’s work on many projects and mentioned that Pierce was helping her with deliverables for the screening of TAR (the movie she produced with Franco). So it seemed like the perfect balance for a collaboration given what each can bring to the project.

She came immediately on board of the project, and the meeting ended with a suggestion from Shruti: ‘Call it H.’