New York’s mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has become the subject of renewed attention after social media users highlighted that he appeared in a Disney film nine years ago, with the detail prompting fresh scrutiny of his long-standing ties to cinema and the extent of his behind-the-scenes work on the same production. The film was Queen of Katwe, the 2016 Disney and ESPN Films drama directed by his mother, the acclaimed filmmaker Mira Nair, about Ugandan chess prodigy Phiona Mutesi. According to the film’s public credits and industry databases, Mamdani had a small on-screen part listed as “Bookie Student” and also worked on the production team, including being credited as third assistant director and as the film’s music supervisor.
The renewed interest follows a viral round of posts noting the cameo and his broader crew roles, with viewers connecting the detail to the trajectory that took Mamdani from creative work in film and music into elected office and, this month, into City Hall as mayor-elect. The production credits show his name repeatedly in different departments, an unusual cluster that reflects a hybrid contribution both in front of the camera and across music and assistant direction. The Metacritic technical listings for Queen of Katwe include “Zohran Kwame Mamdani – third assistant director” and “music supervisor,” while Moviefone’s credits page likewise lists him as the film’s music supervisor alongside the principal department heads.
The cameo was not his only involvement with the film’s soundtrack. Public track listings for Queen of Katwe include writing and performance credits by Mamdani under his stage name, Young Cardamom, for several tracks associated with the production. Those entries, preserved in the soundtrack documentation for the film, place his contributions alongside a roster of artists from across East and West Africa and the diaspora, consistent with the director’s long-standing practice of fusing location-specific sound with narrative.
Mamdani’s relationship to the film industry predates Queen of Katwe and is rooted in his family background. He is the son of Mira Nair and the Ugandan-born academic Mahmood Mamdani, a political theorist and historian who has taught at Columbia University. Biographical profiles of the family record the transcontinental path from Kampala to Cape Town and then to New York, and they note the family’s continued base in Manhattan. Those profiles, along with public biographical entries, have been frequently cited in recent days as observers contextualise how the future mayor’s upbringing straddled art, scholarship, and politics.