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 and awarded the Panavision Young Filmmaker Award.
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 Tribeca 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 filming a docu-series called Radical Billionaires for European powerhouseARTEwith Berlin-based Hyperbole GmbH (LEONINE Studios). His next fiction feature, Fire on Holy Mountain, is a post-colonial supernatural dark comedy set in Bali, produced by Palme d'Or winner Andro Steinborn, and begins shooting Q1 2027.
Daniel also acts as a creative consultant for the International Astronomical Union, which is 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.
The Sloan Foundation recently shortlisted his Silicon Valley-set "designer babies" satire The Procreators for the Science in Cinema Fellowship.
Follow his Substack TheLunaGrovefor cultural criticism, speculative fiction, poetry and the occasional dispatch from where the algorithm hasn't dared to tread.
