What is it to make a movie? Often, we think of singular auteurs almost effortlessly spinning visions of astounding beauty from nothing but their imagination for us to reverentially take in while immersed in the darkness of a cinema. However, even for those who spend hours reading about the creative process and hungrily consuming the details of a production, rarely can we truly get an honest look into a film’s creation. Is there not the devastating potential that you could spend years and years of your life toiling away only to discover what you made may serve more as a monument to the pain you felt while creating it than it was to any sort of artistic achievement? What would you then do with this complicated legacy? If you’re filmmaker Zia Anger, you make My First Film, a fantastic “feature debut” that is grappling with an unreleased prior film and an extension of her solo performance which is now also one of the most surprising, layered films of the year. It’s the meta movie to end all meta movies.
The first time I became familiar with Anger was at the Tacoma Film Festival in 2019, when she was touring said solo performance that she also called My First Film. With a laptop in hand that she projected on the screen, the multimedia experience involved her, among many things, sharing clips of the first feature she had made, Always All Ways, Anne Marie, and offering reflections in typed messages about the process now that it had been lost to time after never getting distribution. It was deeply honest, often quite painful, and ultimately poetic in ways that have stuck with me ever since. This performance is radically different from the film My First Film, now getting a release five years later through MUBI, as I soon realized while watching it. At the same time, the reason this context is important is that the two remain in conversation with each other as this film expands on her history by creating a movie that restages the first production she ever made while also bringing with it a similar framing. It takes us deeper into her film and its legacy, holding up her own past to the light so we can see all of her insecurities bursting free. At the same time, her feature is given new life as it becomes a quiet triumph when remolded and revisited all these many years later.
What Is ‘My First Film’ About?
The film begins similarly to how Anger’s solo performance did with text and clips, recounting one particularly frustrating interview that serves as a launching point into her past. This further soon shifts to being more built around narration as opposed to the reading of written words, though we do occasionally see text being typed on screen. The one doing the typing this time appears to be Vita, played by an outstanding Odessa Young of films like The Damned, Manodrome, and Shirley, who is reflecting on her first feature 15 years prior.
She is the Zia of this story, navigating the stressful process of making a film with a group of her friends and one particularly annoying boyfriend. There is a charming abandon to how this is all shot with the group gathering and sharing in the giddy excitement of creating something together, capped off by a scene of a plane flying by at a perilously low level that gets waved away. This potential danger is a sign of how little any of the group, Vita included, know what they’re doing. They’re winging it and with that comes the sense that this film may not be what anyone hoped it would be. This is something that gets spoken aloud by Vita in a key moment, proving to be part of the multitude of ways the film is a work of daring self-portraiture that isn’t afraid to engage with the past personal mistakes being made.
As we see, this film is by no means the creation of just one person and, in many ways, its crumbling comes because that wasn’t appreciated. Though Vita is its director, the story expands to see more of the crew in a way that Anger’s solo show didn’t, finding more unexpected character beats just as it explores similar thematic ground. My First Film is increasingly focused on where a director may have not been as considerate of the needs of her crew as she should have, with one central moment playing back several times over in slightly different ways capturing a feeling of pain and regret in striking fashion. This is no romanticized look back at a past film, but a deeply honest one. In every frame, both within the production of the film and outside of it, it feels like we’re witnessing something profoundly personal that may soon slip through our fingers. It’s worth cherishing every moment of.
‘My First Film’ Is a Bold New Beginning for Zia Anger
More than anything, it’s the ways that Anger pulls back the curtain and disrupts the film’s more conventional narrative progression that makes it into something quite special. Comparisons could be made to Joanna Hogg’s stunning The Souvenir and The Souvenir: Part II as well as Víctor Erice’s breathtaking Close Your Eyes in how they’re all similarly autobiographical, though that would only get at a small sliver of how My First Film extends into something more. Each is vastly different formally, with Anger letting things get both more slippery and intentionally scattered, as if we’re remembering a distant memory back along with her. Nowhere is this more felt than in the film’s bold, beautiful big swing of a finale.
Without robbing any of what preceded it of its power and sense of mourning, all the layers it pulls back reveal something preciously hopeful. It’s still painful and more than a bit unwieldy in ways it may not have a full handle on, but is that not life as an artist? Anger certainly seems to think so and, as it all gets realized so spectacularly here, her fantastic first film that’s really not the first is one we can only hope serves as a new beginning to many more.
My First Film is in theaters in the U.S. starting August 30 and on MUBI starting September 6. Click below for showtimes near you.
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