This Hollywood Filmmaker’s Career Started With a Crush at UVA

You could say this story is straight out of a movie.

Hala Matar was an undergraduate student at the University of Virginia in the early 2000s, studying theater and drama.

One day, she was chatting with a crush when he started raving about an introductory cinematography course taught by Kevin Everson, a professor of art. Smitten, Matar enrolled, and her life took a gigantic turn.

“I ended up taking three more classes with (Everson),” she said. “He’s still my favorite professor ever. And I think what is really amazing is a lot of people took that class from different majors, like physics, engineering, and a lot of them ended up pursuing filmmaking.”

The 2006 graduate went all in. So far in her career, she’s directed actors Kristen Stewart, Chloe Sevigny and Johnny Knoxville, and made short films that showcase the brands Chanel, Louis Vuitton and Vivienne Westwood.

Matar’s movie features “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” breakout star Maria Bakalova, Jack Farthing, Daryl Wein and Abigail Cowen. (Contributed photo)

Now she’s on the film festival circuit screening her first feature-length piece, “Electra.” 

“It’s about a journalist who travels to Rome to interview a famous musician,” Matar said. “Then he gets invited to a country estate, and you realize a lot of the characters are not who they say they are and that they have ulterior motives.”

The Hollywood Reporter called the thriller “the love child” of “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and “Saltburn.” Matar humbly said “Electra,” loosely based on the Greek tragedy of the same name, cannot measure up to “Ripley” “because I think it is one of the best films ever,” but it did inspire the writing. She co-wrote the script with one of the movie’s costars, Daryl Wein, and Paul Sado.

Everson says Matar is “amazingly talented.” (Photo by Matt Riley, University Communications)

“Electra” premiered in February at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival, where it was nominated for Best Feature Film. It lost to “Emilia Pérez,” a movie starring Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez that USA Today called “the most wildly original film you’ll see in 2024.”

Matar’s movie received Best Film and Best Narrative Feature nominations at the Oldenburg Film Festival and the Dallas International Film Festival. It won Best Production Design at Italy’s Ischia Film Festival, where it was also nominated for Best Feature Film. It hits U.S. theaters in February or March.

Because “Electra” has yet to be picked up by a movie studio, there is no trailer. But you can get a sense of Matar’s film style by watching the music video she did for the band Interpol. It stars Stewart, perhaps best known for her appearances in the “Twilight” movie trilogy.

“I think visually, I tend to be very bold, and I like delving into the character’s psyche,” she said. “I think a lot of my films have surrealistic qualities. I guess they are hyper-real and have a playful, whimsical element to them.”

A Professor and Friends for Life

When the Hollywood Reporter wrote about Matar’s film in September, she picked up her phone and texted a link to the article to Everson, her mentor and now friend.

“Hala was amazingly talented,” Everson recalled. “I still show some of her films in class when I talk about color. Hell, she dressed the way her films look. She was all vibrant and real and stylish.”