Director Guy Nattiv's new film "The Liberation," premiering at the Telluride Film Festival before a December release via Bleecker Street, dramatises the real story of his own grandmother, a Holocaust survivor who left her family to join a cult in the 1980s. Nattiv spent a decade preparing to make the deeply personal project, which stars Carrie Coon as Rita, a character inspired by his grandmother, and challenges assumptions about who is vulnerable to cult recruitment.

The film follows Rita, a Holocaust survivor living an unfulfilling life in suburban New Jersey, who eventually leaves her husband (played by Coon's real-life partner Tracy Letts) and children (Bella Ramsey and Odessa Young) to follow Ricki (Lily James), the charismatic leader of a new-age community. Nattiv, an Oscar winner for the short film "Skin" and director of the Golda Meir biopic "Golda," said writing the screenplay triggered a panic attack that required a hospital visit, as he confronted his grandmother's "misery" and inner conflict. He researched her life through diaries and letters after her death, and describes the project as blending real family history with fictionalised "what if" scenarios.