“Everything I’m doing right now feels miraculous,” says filmmaker Minhal Baig. Consider the run she’s been on. We Grown Now, Baig’s lyrical study of two boys coming of age in early-’90s Cabrini-Green, hit theaters nationwide last year following its premiere at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival, where it won a Changemaker Award for its social message, and had its streaming rights picked up by Netflix. Baig landed a writing gig for Amazon’s upcoming adaptation of the comic-book noir series Criminal. (She has also written for the acclaimed animated series BoJack Horseman.) And last February she gave birth to her first child.

Growing up in Rogers Park, Baig, the daughter of Pakistani immigrants, would visit a now-defunct multiplex at the Lincoln Village shopping center to see Bollywood films; her cinephile father introduced her to American classics, such as The Bridge on the River Kwai. It was at Yale, where she studied painting and playwriting, that she began to consider turning her passion for movies into a career. “Filmmaking married my interest in narrative storytelling with visual arts,” Baig says. We Grown Now, which was lauded by critics, made for a poetic follow-up to her breakthrough feature, Hala, another bildungsroman shot in Chicago (including at her alma mater, Northside College Prep). Focused on a Muslim teenager at odds with her conservative immigrant parents, it debuted to acclaim at Sundance in 2019 and was later picked up by Apple TV+.

On deck: filming her latest screenplay. The Hyde Park resident won’t divulge much about it, except to say it’s not set in Chicago. “It’s really different from anything I’ve made before — a lot bigger, and featuring adult characters, adult needs. That’s kind of new for me. I’m excited to explore things closer to my experience now that I’m in my 30s.” In other words, she grown now.