Azazel Jacobs, the director who keeps filming the rooms families can’t leave

Azazel Jacobs

Photo: Kevin Paul / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	September 27, 1972 New York City, United States
Occupation	Film director and screenwriter
Known for	His Three Daughters, Terri, French Exit
Awards	Gotham · Independent Spirit (shared) · FIPRESCI Prize, Gijón International Film Festival · FIPRESCI Prize, IndieLisboa · Slamdance Grand Jury Prize, Best Dramatic Short

In His Three Daughters, the father stays almost entirely off screen. Three estranged sisters, played by Carrie Coon, Elizabeth Olsen and Natasha Lyonne, wait for him to die in a rent-stabilised apartment on the Lower East Side, and the camera seldom leaves the kitchen, the hallway and the threshold of his room. Azazel Jacobs wrote, directed, edited and produced the film while he was learning, as he put it, how to pay someone else’s bills and understand their medication. The someone else was his own mother and father.

That overlap is close to a signature. For three decades Jacobs has pointed a camera at the rooms where families hold on to each other, and the question his career is asking now is unusually concrete. Since the film came out, his mother, the painter Flo Jacobs, and his father, the experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs, have both died, four months apart. The apartment that anchors his cinema no longer has its original tenants.

He grew up inside it: a Jewish household in a Tribeca loft where both parents made art for a living. Ken Jacobs reworked found footage into films such as Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son, and with Flo he founded the Millennium Film Workshop in 1966. Their son was born in New York City in 1972, went to Bayard Rustin High School, studied film at SUNY Purchase and then took a master’s degree at the AFI Conservatory in Los Angeles, the city he would call home for more than twenty years.

The first films cost almost nothing. A short, Kirk and Kerry, won the Grand Jury Prize for dramatic shorts at Slamdance in 1997. Nobody Needs to Know followed in 2003, and The GoodTimesKid, a micro-budget feature in which Jacobs also plays one of the leads, found a cult audience and a re-release from Kino International.

Momma’s Man is where the subject and the method locked together. It follows a man, played by Matt Boren, who visits his parents in New York and cannot make himself fly home to his wife and newborn child in Los Angeles. Jacobs shot it in the family loft and cast Ken and Flo Jacobs as the parents, an act of autobiography that he later explained in practical terms: he made it after realising that the place he grew up in was a rental. The film premiered at Sundance in 2008 and took the FIPRESCI prize at IndieLisboa.

Terri widened the frame without leaving the theme. John C. Reilly plays a vice-principal who takes an overweight teenager who wears pyjamas to school under his wing, from a screenplay by the novelist Patrick deWitt. It competed at Sundance and Locarno and won the FIPRESCI prize at Gijón. Television came next: Jacobs directed every episode of Doll & Em, the Sky Atlantic and HBO comedy built on the friendship of Emily Mortimer and Dolly Wells, then episodes of Mozart in the Jungle and of Sorry for Your Loss, with Elizabeth Olsen, who would return for His Three Daughters.

The Lovers, released by A24 in 2017, is the film that has travelled furthest. Debra Winger and Tracy Letts play a long-married couple, each with a lover on the side, who stumble back into bed with each other just as both are ready to leave. The screenplay earned Jacobs an Independent Spirit Award nomination, and in 2024 India released Do Aur Do Pyaar, an official remake directed by Shirsha Guha Thakurta with Vidya Balan and Pratik Gandhi, billed as the first remake of an A24 film.

French Exit is where the method strained. Adapted from another deWitt novel, it gave Michelle Pfeiffer the role of a Manhattan widow who runs through her fortune and decamps to Paris with her son, played by Lucas Hedges, and a cat she believes carries her late husband’s spirit. It closed the New York Film Festival in 2020 and earned Pfeiffer a Golden Globe nomination, but the reviews were mixed and much of the praise stopped at her performance. It was also the starriest and, by his own account, the most complicated of his films to finance. Jacobs has joked that watching a montage of his work made him realise he had made the same film over and over. The joke works because it is partly true. The rooms, the inertia and the families recur, and the further a Jacobs film drifts from them, the less critics have trusted it.

His Three Daughters answered with a reduction. He set it up with no announcement before shooting, filmed it largely in a single apartment on 35mm with the cinematographer Sam Levy, and shot the scenes in order. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2023, where Netflix bought worldwide rights for a reported $7 million, and reached the service in September 2024 after a short theatrical run. It won the Gotham Award for best screenplay and the Independent Spirit Robert Altman Award, shared with its cast, and Rolling Stone put it at the top of its list of the year’s best films.

Since then most of his public work has served other people’s films. In January 2026 he sat on the U.S. Dramatic Competition jury at Sundance alongside Janicza Bravo and Nisha Ganatra, the panel that gave its grand jury prize to Beth de Araújo’s Josephine. He interviewed Ira Sachs about Peter Hujar’s Day for Filmmaker Magazine, directed an episode of the Prime Video thriller The Better Sister, was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2025 and was among the filmmakers at the Vatican’s gathering on cinema with Pope Leo XIV that November.

He is married to Diaz Jacobs, whose pilot Cherries he produced for Sundance’s episodic programme in 2018. The couple left Los Angeles for New York at the height of the pandemic so that he could be near his parents, the move that put him back inside the subject of his best work. Flo Jacobs died on 4 June 2025; Ken Jacobs died on 5 October 2025, at 92, of kidney failure, according to his son.

No new feature has been announced. Gossamer, an animated series adapted from Lois Lowry’s novel that he directed with Heidi Bivens for Bron Digital, with Forest Whitaker, Thomasin McKenzie and Vera Farmiga among the voices, still has no release date. Asked what follows a film this close to home, Jacobs has said that he always tries to go in the opposite direction. The next one will be the first he writes after both of his parents are gone, and the clearest test yet of whether that instinct holds.