What does it mean to make a film? We often think of singular auteurs who almost effortlessly create visions of astonishing beauty from nothing but their imagination, which we can then gaze upon in awe in the darkness of a movie theater. Yet even those who spend hours reading about the creative process and voraciously devouring the details of a production can rarely gain a truly honest insight into the making of a film. Isn’t there a devastating possibility that you could toil for years only to find that what you’ve created is more of a monument to the pain you felt in creating it than to any artistic achievement? What would you do with this complicated legacy then? If you’re a filmmaker, Zia Angeryou do My first filma fantastic “feature film debut” that explores an unreleased previous film and represents an extension of her solo performance, which is now also one of the most surprising and complex films of the year. It is the metafilm to end all metafilms.
The first time I met Anger was at the 2019 Tacoma Film Festival, when she was touring with the aforementioned solo performance, which she also called “My First Film.” With a laptop in hand, which she projected onto the screen, the multimedia experience included her presenting clips of her first film, Always all ways, Anne Marieand offered reflections on the process in typed messages after it was lost to time, never circulated. It was deeply honest, often quite painful, and ultimately poetic in a way that has stayed with me ever since. This performance is radically different from the film My first filmwhich is now being released via MUBI five years later, as I quickly realized upon watching. At the same time, this context is important because it keeps the two in conversation as this film expands their story, creating a film that re-enacts their very first production while also bringing a similar framework. It takes us deeper into their film and its legacy, holding their own past to light so we can see all their insecurities bursting open. At the same time, it breathes new life into their feature film as it becomes a quiet triumph when re-imagined and revisited all these many years later.
What is “My First Film” about?
The film begins similarly to Anger’s solo performance with text and excerptsrecounts a particularly frustrating interview that serves as a jumping-off point into her past. This soon shifts further to narration as opposed to reading written words, although we do occasionally see text typed on the screen. The one typing this time seems to be Vita, played by a stellar Odessa Boy from films like The Damned, ManodromAnd Shirleywho reflects on her first feature film 15 years ago.
She’s the Zia of this story, struggling through the stressful process of filmmaking with a group of friends and one particularly annoying boyfriend. The way this is all shot is charming and serene, the group gathering and sharing the giddy excitement of creating something together, capped off by a scene where a plane flies dangerously low by and is waved away. This potential danger is a sign of how little the group, Vita included, knows what they’re doing. They improvise, and that brings with it the feeling that maybe this film isn’t what everyone had hoped it would be. This is said out loud by Vita at a key moment, and proves to be part of the multitude of ways the film a work of daring self-portraits that is not afraid to deal with the personal mistakes of the past.
As we can see, this film is by no means the creation of a single person, and in many ways its fall apart is due to a lack of appreciation for that. Even though Vita is the director, the story expands to show more of the crew, which was not the case with Anger’s solo show, finding more unexpected character traits while exploring similar themes. My first film increasingly focuses on cases where a director may not have paid as much attention to the needs of her crew as she should havewith a pivotal moment replayed multiple times in slightly different ways, capturing a sense of pain and regret in a powerful way. This is not a romanticized look back at a past film, but a deeply honest one. In every frame, both during the film’s production and outside of it, it feels like we are witnessing something deeply personal that could soon slip through our fingers. Every moment of it is worth cherishing.
“My First Film” is a brave new beginning for Zia Anger
More than anything else, It’s the way Anger pulls back the curtain and interrupts the film’s more conventional narrative that makes it truly special.Comparisons could be made with Joanna Hoggis breathtaking The souvenir And The Souvenir: Part II as well as Victor Ericeis breathtaking Close your eyes in how they are all similarly autobiographical, although that only reflects a small part of how My first film expands into something bigger. Each is formally completely different, with Anger making things both raunchier and deliberately disjointed, as if we’re remembering a distant memory along with her. Nowhere is this more evident than in the film’s bold, beautiful, high-swinging finale.
Without taking away the power and sense of grief that came before it, all the layers it peels back reveal something preciously hopeful. It’s still painful and more than a little heavy-handed in ways that perhaps don’t have a complete handle on it, but isn’t that life as an artist? Anger certainly seems to think so, and as everything is so spectacularly executed here, her fantastic first film, which is actually not the first, and which we can only hope will serve as a new beginning for many more.
My First Movie is in theaters August 30 and on MUBI September 6. Click below to see showtimes in your area.
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