Chicagoan of the Year in Film: Screenwriter and director Minhal Baig has been finding new stories to tell

Some years it’s easy. This year, the accomplishments of Rogers Park native and current Hyde Park resident Minhal Baig, as she’s rarely described in interviews originating outside Chicago, make Baig the happily inevitable Tribune Chicagoan of the Year in Film.

Let’s see, 2023 … well, the biggie: Baig’s third full-length project, “We Grown Now,” a tender coming-of-age drama set in the Cabrini-Green projects in 1992, premiered on the festival circuit. That circuit included the Toronto International Film Festival, where Sony Pictures Classics acquired “We Grown Now” for U.S. distribution in April 2024. This month, meanwhile, Baig’s film received three nominations from the Independent Spirit Awards, including best feature, alongside “Past Lives,” “American Fiction,” “May December,” “Passages” and “All of Us Strangers.”

The Writers Guild of America and Screen Actors Guild strikes, now settled, slowed things down plenty this year. But roughly 10 seconds after the WGA secured an impressive contract after its 148-day strike, Baig got back to work.

This meant resuming her place in the (virtual) writers’ room on the upcoming eight-part Amazon Studios thriller “Criminal,” based on the Ed Brubaker comic book series. It’s going into production in a few months.

“I’m fortunate,” she said the other day at Build Coffee, tucked away at 61st and Blackstone, one of Baig’s preferred writing spots. “During the strike a lot of shows got canceled. And we were spared. It’s very pulpy. And it’s a genre I’ve never done before.”

In early 2023 the Yale graduate, now 34, returned to New Haven, Connecticut, to teach screenwriting and film and media studies. It was, for Baig, a cathartic change-up, particularly “just before the strike. To remind myself why I do this for a living.”

Her husband, film production executive Michael Finfer, has lots of family here in Morton Grove and Evanston; Baig, too, has family, in Rogers Park. Between holiday gatherings, Baig recently wrapped up a screenplay for Paramount, based on The Verge contributor Claire L. Evans’ story about the 1980s hacker, “phreaker” and scam artist Susan Headley. The script, like the nonfiction account, carries the title “Searching for Susy Thunder.” Where it goes from Baig’s script is up to 2024 to decide. Meantime she has resumed work on her next screenplay, untitled, which she hopes to film in 2025.

Unlike her previous 2019 feature “Hala” and “We Grown Now,” this film, she said, reflects an adult’s perspective, not a child’s or a teenager’s. It’s a mother/daughter story painted on a larger canvas than Baig has used before as a filmmaker. “In the writing process I’ve tended to write things I felt I could reasonably make. I was starting to move away from that with ‘We Grown Now’; with certain sequences I wasn’t sure how I’d direct it while I was writing it.” (She figured it out, beautifully, when the time came.) “With this next movie, there’s all these parts to it — some of it’s set overseas — I have no idea how to execute.” Pause. “Yet.”

Baig, who’s having a baby in a couple of months, likens writing to grooming. “I just keep combing a script, like a cat. You know. Get all the tangles out.”

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

mjphillips@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @phillipstribune