Hot Water

Directed & Written by Ramzi Bashour

In this unconventional road comedy, debut feature ﬁlmmaker Ramzi Bashour tells the ﬁnely observed story of a Lebanese mother and her American son on an odyssey across the United States. Lubna Azabal (Incendies) stars as Layal, a tightly wound Arabic professor whose troubled teenage son Daniel (Daniel Zolghadri, Funny Pages) is expelled from high school, prompting her to escort him from Indiana to California to live with his estranged father. As the pair move westward, they have a series of encounters with unlikely people and places—including a memorable stop with an eccentric friend (Dale Dickey)—that reveals the fractures and growing bonds between them. Poetically shot against expansive landscapes, roadside motels, gas stations, and diners, Hot Water upends traditional ideas of home and belonging with cutting humor and remarkable beauty.

Official Selection: Sundance 2026

Director’s Statement

I grew up in Beirut. That was home. My mother is from Indiana and my father is from Syria, and I moved to the US when I was 18, after the 2006 summer war in Lebanon. After graduating from Indiana University, I spent the next year traveling all over the country working in kitchens and on farms. Having seen nothing but Indiana up until then, this felt like a good idea. And the further away from the Midwest I went the more interesting things got. Ohio, Kentucky, California, Oregon, Washington, Vancouver, BC. — by 2012, I was living in Bozeman, Montana. It was the height of the Occupy Wall Street movement. I had two vegan Anarchist roommates and the three of us quit our kitchen jobs and packed everything we had into a Subaru Outback and hit the road from occupy camp to occupy camp, all the way to Oakland. On came Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and the Paciﬁc Ocean. There were naked hippies, staggering cities, snow covered deserts, and muddy hot springs. I ended up on the north shore of Maui, Hawaii, working in a bakery. As far away from Lebanon as one could physically get: its antipode, the total opposite side of the globe. And for the ﬁrst time, I really started to miss home: the food, the language, friends, family. So, a beautiful, strange, very long trip later, I decided to move back to Beirut. Like our lead character, Layal, my parents are teachers/professors, who moved where work took them. And like her son, Daniel, I’m a third-culture-kid, grew up in a bilingual home, and had trouble in school when I was a teen. And like both of them, I saw this country for the ﬁrst time under unusual circumstances and was profoundly changed by it.