Daniel Y-Li Grove

Daniel Y-Li Grove is an award-winning filmmaker, author and critic.

His debut film A Better Place Than This, inspired by the real life hangman of Changi Prison, helped trigger a moratorium on Singapore's controversial Mandatory Death Penalty. The film was acquired by PBS, awarded the Panavision Young Filmmaker Award and shortlisted for the Student Oscars.

After launching the production banner Black Light District, he produced Ana Lily Amirpour's Sundance cult-classic A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night, which the Hollywood Reporter called “a bold new voice in world cinema”. Kino Lorber and Vice Media distributed.

The Persian Connection, Daniel's feature directorial debut about a war-child turned gangster in the Persian opium underworld of LA, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival and was named “the most striking of films which spiked the tonic of open-mindedness with firewater” by the Financial Times. Samuel Goldwyn and MGM distributed. FX acquired series rights.

He is currently in production on The Accelerationists, a documentary about techno-optimism, for European powerhouse ARTE and in association with Hyperbole GmbH (LEONINE Studios). His next fiction feature Fire on Holy Mountain is a supernatural murder mystery set in Bali and produced by Palme d'Or alumnus Andro Steinborn (Telos Pictures UG). Filming commences 2027.

Serving a lifelong passion for stargazing, Daniel consults for the International Astronomical Union (IAU) for whom he and Flow Productions are developing an exhibition celebrating the 50th anniversary of Voyager 1 to premiere at the IAU's 2027 congress in Rome. The IAU are also supporting his debut novel From the Stars, a literary sci-fi about the first child born in space, by networking him with Nobel and NASA scientists. Pulitzer Prize-winning Australian author Geraldine Brooks is mentoring.

The Sloan Foundation recently shortlisted his Silicon Valley-set "designer babies" satire The Procreators for the 2026 Science in Cinema Fellowship.

Follow his Substack TheLunaGrove for cultural criticism, speculative fiction, poetry and the occasional dispatch from where the algorithm hasn't dared to tread.