“It Was All Greek to Me”: Why Producer Miranda Bailey Went Int’l to Back an Indie Film From Greece

To say that Miranda Bailey (The Diary of a Teenage Girl, God’s Country) likes to play it safe would just be insane.

Through her production firm Cold Iron Pictures, the producer-actress-writer-director has backed the likes of Swiss Army Man, the Daniels’ surreal comedy about a stranded man, played by Paul Dano, on the verge of suicide who befriends a flatulent corpse, portrayed by Daniel Radcliffe. And at Sundance 2025, the company premiered Amanda Kramer’s By Design, starring Melanie Griffith as narrator and Juliette Lewis as a woman who swaps bodies with a chair.

Bailey is currently in the British capital for SXSW London, where she is a producer on another genre-bending film, along with Ioanna Bolomyti, Elizabeth Woodward, Lauren Mann, Yannis Economides, Vladimir Anastasov, Angela Nestorovska, Zvonimir Munivrana, Maja Popovic Milojevic and Irina Malcea-Candea.

The movie is The Boy With the Light-Blue Eyes, the feature film debut of Greek writer-director Thanasis Neofotistos, which world premiered as part of the Screen Festival of SXSW London 2026 on Thursday evening. The cinematic allegory for exclusion and the desire for love and freedom, which can also be viewed as a queer coming-of-age story, stars Giorgos Karydis as Petros, a boy forced by his strict grandmother, and the village mayor, to hide behind a mask because he has blue eyes. Why? Well, that eye color is a source of fear and superstition for the locals of the remote mountain village where they live.