NIGHT FEEDS

Rana Roy

Rana Roy is a London-born, Dubai-raised filmmaker with Egyptian, Nubian-Sudanese, and Indian roots. Her artistic journey spans 25 years, beginning as a dancer in the Middle East, where movement served as both expression and defiance. As a teenager, she won a prominent BBC competition as a singer and dancer, which led to a record deal and touring with Rihanna. She later starred in ITV’s Britannia High and secured an album deal with Universal Records before fully transitioning into acting.
Her acting credits include roles in Ramy, Gossip Girl, Harlem, and the multi-Tony Award-winning play Ink, among others. Roy wrote and directed her award-winning short film Chicken in 2020. After creating eleven short films, she graduated with an MFA in Directing from the American Film Institute (AFI), class of 2025.
Her thesis film, Night Feeds, won both the prestigious AFI Donors Grant and the Amazon Innovative Storytellers Grant. This film also serves as a proof of concept for her debut feature, Mummy.
As a director, Rana Roy is known for moving both characters and camera with the pulse, instinct, and breath of dance—a discipline that continues to influence her work. She gravitates toward poetic, boundary-pushing narratives that reveal the fragile, haunting beauty of intimacy.

Director Statement

Night Feeds is a psychological horror born from my deeply intimate experience of early motherhood’s raw ruptures and psychological tremors. It explores the ancestral portal of the collective womb wound in a visceral portrait of motherhood in our time. After giving birth three years ago, my mind and body fractured as the outside world began to mirror my inner reality. Deep in the struggle of my own postpartum, I watched in horror as mothers in other parts of the world lived through my worst nightmare. I couldn’t help but see my newborn son in their arms—especially as our world justified the killing of children simply because it deemed them other. In this film, through the backdrop of war witnessed from our screens, we explore the common illusion of safety Americans and those from other privileged countries often find in geographical and emotional distance—the idea that the violence we witness overseas is separate from ourselves. This is rarely true for families of color, and Night Feeds reminds us that the violence perpetuated overseas will always return home to haunt you. This is an emotionally and socially impactful film, which affirms mothers of color that they are not alone. I believe this story will resonate with those who share the desire to make a safer world not only for ourselves, but for future generations. I hope Night Feeds crawls deep under your skin as it begs the question: when the world around you loses its mind, can you listen to your own?