Daniel Okoye

Daniel Okoye covers classic catalog releases and festival coverage for Trumpwatcher. He holds a BFA in Cinema Studies from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and spent nine years programming for regional film festivals in the Mid-Atlantic, where he learned to spot the difference between a film that plays well at 11pm on Saturday night and a film that survives the trip home in your head. His specialty is global cinema, restoration projects, and the gradual rediscovery of overlooked work from earlier decades.

Daniel started in festival programming as a volunteer screener — the unglamorous job of watching every submission in a category and recommending which ones the senior programmers should consider. Over nine years he sat through several thousand films and learned a hard lesson: most films are not bad, they are simply unfocused. The ones that survive editing and emerge with a coherent identity are rarer than industry coverage would have you believe, and they show up across budgets, languages, and decades.

At Trumpwatcher he focuses on three things: films 10+ years old that have just been restored or added to a major streamer, festival coverage based on public post-release information, and international films receiving US theatrical or major-streamer distribution. He has never claimed to attend a festival he did not actually attend, and he does not write about films he has not finished. He believes the most useful thing a critic can do is point a reader toward a film they would not have found on their own. Reach him through the contact form.