Ramzi Bashour attends the premiere of “Hot Water” at the Eccles Theatre on January 23, 2026, in Park City, Utah. (Photo by Jemal Countess/Sundance Institute)
By Cecilia Santini
The best things about America are diners and road trips, says one of the two leads of Hot Water, a warm and moving film for anyone who has felt the sense of expansiveness and possibility that accompanies a long drive through the great American West.
When Daniel (Daniel Zolghadri), a high school senior in Indiana, is expelled for fighting with another student, his mother, Layal (Lubna Azabal), drives him west to live with his father in California in search of a fresh start and a chance at finishing school.
Layal and Daniel’s journey takes them through pure Americana — gas stations, motels, diners, hot springs, desert canyons, Las Vegas. Their sweet, combative relationship is given color and texture the further west they go. As shots of the landscape unroll along the road, you feel like you’re riding along in their old Subaru Outback with them.
A hopeful and confident debut feature from writer-director Ramzi Bashour, full of love for its central characters and the outcasts and misfits they encounter on their journey, Hot Water is screening in the U.S. Dramatic Competition at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. After its January 23 premiere at the Eccles Theatre, Bashour, Zolghadri, and Dale Dickey, who appears in an important supporting role, came onstage to a standing ovation from the audience.
“I moved to Indiana when I was about 18 for undergrad, and when I finished college I travelled around the United States for many, many, many months and I worked in kitchens and on farms,” says Bashour, who grew up in Lebanon, during the Q&A after the screening. “I went all over Ohio, Kentucky, up California, Oregon, Washington, Montana, back around, and ended up in Hawaii of all places, which is as far away from Lebanon as you can physically get. And I moved back home after that and started reflecting on this long trip I took, and this idea came.”
Hot Water is perhaps most of all a showcase for its two outstanding leads, Azabal and Zolghadri. Their chemistry is abrasive, irritable, and tender all at once, as Daniel and Layal work through their assumptions and fears about each other.
Layal is weary and at her wit’s end, trying to quit cigarettes and worrying about her aging mother in Lebanon at the same time as she’s teaching Arabic to exasperating college students and working to keep her son from messing up his life. Azabal’s performance is physical, funny, and sympathetic. “I was a huge fan of Lubna’s ever since I started getting into cinema in high school,” Bashour says. “She reminded me of all these Arabic teachers who I drove mad in class. And I just thought there would be something really incendiary and bombastic about taking someone like that and putting them in a car across many of the places I went to.”
Daniel is confident and vulnerable, infuriating and sweet, overgrown after being held back in school for two years. (“Daniel, Daniel. You’re just frigging amazing,” Dickey tells Zolghadri on stage at one point.) By the end of the film, you feel like you know both mother and son quite well, and you’re sorry to say goodbye.
Their contentious, if loving, dynamic is offset by a gracious turn from Dickey, which gives the film a peaceful, restorative center. “Seeing the whole gorgeous, beautiful thing and their relationship, it’s just stunning. I’m honored to be a part of it,” says Dickey, getting emotional.
Bashour describes how he met various kind and colorful people during his travels who inspired parts of the film. “There’s this sort of gregarity and outside-the-boxness and a certain kind of bohemia that I found that I channeled into [Dickey’s character] mostly, which, played by Dale, is better than I could have imagined when I was writing it. But that’s one example of many lovely, colorful, special people who may not even remember me finding their way into this film.”
