Filmmaker Spotlight: Zoe Dahmen (Stuck & Leaving)

September 11, 2025

Every year, the Charlotte Film Festival brings bold voices to the screen—but some voices echo off-screen too. In this spotlight, we’re getting to know Zoe Dahmen, whose work caught our eye and stuck with us.

What led you to creating Stuck & Leaving?

Every film is a confluence of feeling, desire, people, and opportunities. I knew I wanted to make something with my lead actresses (the amazing Sofia France and Devon Khalsa). I’d never seen them in a room together but I knew that they should be [in a room together]. At the same time record store opened up in my neighborhood. I love mysteries, yet I have a weary relationship with the true crime genre, and I was curious about that. I love writing letters, and have saved many unanswered letters from my adolescence. There was a boy in my neighborhood who rode around on a bike carrying a fishing pole, and he was being bullied by the other kids. I’ve loved many friends, and many of them have drifted away from me. It goes on like this.

I had all the puzzle pieces and I just had to figure how they fit together. And the fitting together is what usually keeps me going. Once I can see the shape of all the pieces together I like to say I’ve “cracked it” like I’m cracking a case. I did always want to be detective growing up…

What were some inspirations going into the creative process?

My main inspiration were my two lead actresses. Sofia France and Devon Khalsa are amazing actors, but also amazing writers who don’t write enough. I’m constantly pestering them to write more, and I wanted to make them part of the script process. I brought them both in before I had a script with a pitch about a film centered on a friendship that’s breaking up. That was the core, and I had a lot of other fragments, but nothing concrete because I wanted to devise with both of them in the room. What they responded to in their characters was my north star for a lot of the writing process, which was relatively quick once we got started. Most of the dialogue quirks and world-building came from those early workshop sessions. And of course the chemistry building started there too. Neither Sofia nor Devon knew each other when we started the process, I just had a gut instinct that they would be great together. Luckily I was right, or else that first meeting would have been awfully awkward…

Tell us what you hope the audience gets from Stuck & Leaving?

This is always a tough question for me. I’m a very “nuts and bolts” director, I’m usually concerned with questions like, “does this read on screen?”, “does this make sense?”, “do people care?”. I usually feel like if I can get the plot and the characters across without fucking it up then everything else (emotion, meaning, themes) will follow from that. It’s hard for me to extrapolate beyond the basics to a takeaway or a “get.” I just hope people “get” the film!

But yeah, this movie is about loss, a lot of my movies are, so I hope that people can connect with that idea and relate it to the people they’ve lost in their own lives. And ultimately it’s optimistic. Maybe folks will feel compelled to reach out to someone they’ve lost touch with. That would be pretty neat.

How did you become a filmmaker?

I started as a kid making glorified slideshows in Windows Movie Maker. One of my first films was a music video for Queen’s “Princes of the Universe” set to photos of llamas. My parents encouraged me to keep making films and even bought me a mini-DV tape camera for Christmas when I was 12. It was a truly magical moment because I had neither asked for one, nor knew that I wanted one. And. yet, when I opened the box it was entirely, fantastically correct. I immediately started making little soap operas with my friends throughout middle school. Then I got very lucky in high school because they had just added a film program the year before I started. We had an amazing film teacher who encouraged us to reach big, and I did, making two features when I was 16 and 17 respectively. This sounds impressive, but remember, this is the easiest time in your life to make a movie. But I’m a still a filmmaker, and in fact, a lot of my high school friends are still filmmakers making amazing work. Which is honestly pretty astounding! At this point it’s eerie to look back and realize that I’ve been a filmmaker for half my life. I feel very old, but also very very blessed.