A snapshot of the most exciting voices working in American and international cinema today––and with a strong focus on newcomers––the Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look festival returns this week, taking place March 12-16.
As always, the festival brings together a varied, eclectic lineup of cinema from all corners of the world––including a number of films still seeking distribution, making this series perhaps one of your only chances to see these works on the big screen. Check out our top picks below.
100,000,000,000,000 (Virgil Vernier)
Virgil Vernier’s third fiction feature sees him continuing his examination of characters floating through liminal spaces borne out of capital. He follows sex worker Afine (Zakaria Bouti) spending the Christmas holidays alone in Monaco, where he befriends a woman babysitting the daughter of wealthy parents until the new year. Shooting once again on 16mm, Vernier creates a transfixing mood through hazy imagery: Afine and his friend exist in a limbo state, inhabiting areas for the ultra-rich without ever truly being a part of them. What makes Vernier’s work so fascinating is how, with little plot, he conveys the malaise that grows from this hollow form of existence and develops into an apocalyptic dread. – C.J. P.
Bonjour Tristesse (Durga Chew-Bose)
There was slight trepidation going into Bonjour Tristesse. Justifying itself as another “adaptation” of Françoise Sagan’s text rather than remake of Otto Preminger’s masterpiece of mise-en-scène, there’s still some hesitation about the chutzpah that must go into thinking you can top that great craftsman at the height of his power. As directed by writer-turned-filmmaker Durga Chew-Bose with a great deal of formal assurance (you definitely won’t mistake this for something akin to, say, Maximum Overdrive in that career-switch category), this 2024 iteration is a highly respectable effort that’ll speak to countless people the original didn’t. One major difference being that Preminger made the film as a showcase for the muse he was having an affair with, Jean Seberg, casting some leering-male element onto the whole project. Chew-Bose’s project isn’t so much feminist as feminine––that a working-out of neurosis that doesn’t provide completely easy answers. – Ethan V. (full review)
The Fifth Shot of La Jetée (Dominique Cabrera)
While, a few years ago, Bianca Stigter explored a few minutes of footage across an entire documentary in Three Minutes: A Lengthening, Dominique Cabrera’s The Fifth Shot of La Jetée takes an even more narrow scope. As its title suggests, this documentary explores the filmmaker’s excavating of personal history as it relates to a shot from Chris Marker’s masterpiece. Structured as a mystery-of-sorts to put together the many pieces if, indeed, it was Cabrera’s family featured in a “stolen photo,” it’s an inventive, playful work, ranging from complex math calculations of probability if they were there the day of filming to more emotional revelations about the past. While those expecting a more thorough analysis of Marker’s film may leave disappointed, it’s a compelling testament to how many life stories are contained in every frame of cinema. – Jordan R.
Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989 (Göran Hugo Olsson)
Göran Hugo Olsson’s documentary provides an account of the conflict between Israel and Palestine through Sweden’s publi- television broadcaster across more than 30 years. A prologue provides context that the footage should be viewed in: not as any sort of objective take on the subject, but a glimpse into how it was presented to Swedish audiences. Told chronologically in a clinical fashion, with index cards introducing each news segment, the film inevitably serves as both a primer for the ongoing war between the two nations and a look at the evolution of its coverage by the media. Respectable in its disciplined, straightforward presentation that highlights media biases, Olsson correctly frames the film and subject matter for its intended audience, who have mainly engaged with it through screens and an often unquestioned trust in the authorities presenting it. As a title card states in the opening frames, archival material says more about how things are told than how they really happened. – C.J. P.
The Periphery of the Base (Zhou Tao)
Artist Zhou Tao sets his camera on workers in the Gobi desert surrounding an infrastructure project we never see. Zhou observes from afar, panning and zooming in on workers having lunch or making their way through the vast, barren landscape. The camera continues to roam at a deliberate yet restless pace until it enters the realm of abstraction. With a pan or zoom, a defined image of a workers’ camp can suddenly change into something unrecognizable, form into an entirely different image, and then reframe and redefine itself again, all within seconds in the same shot. It’s impossible to identify whether or not The Periphery of the Base achieves this effect in-camera or through some sort of manipulation, but the results are exhilarating. – C.J. P.
When the Phone Rang (Iva Radivojevic)
Premiering at the Locarno Film Festival last year (where it picked up a special mention prize), Iva Radivojevic’s sensitive, enigmatic second feature When the Phone Rang centers on a phone call received by the protagonist Lana informing her a grandparent has passed, the foundation of which evolves into a memory piece exploring the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Radivojevic’s editing background (on such features as King Coal, Ma, and this year’s John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office) is beautifully articulated here, fragments of tender loss for both family and identity pieced together in compellingly unconventional yet affecting ways. – Jordan R.
Zodiac Killer Project (Charlie Shackleton)
What would a feature-length director commentary look like when the film was never made? This is the slippery, fascinating conceit of Charlie Shackleton’s rather brilliant Zodiac Killer Project, which finds the director walking through his failed attempt to adapt Lyndon E. Lafferty’s book The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge into the first major documentary on the unsolved case. What emerges, one could argue, is even more intellectually stimulating than the original intentions: a sui generis, often humorous stream-of-consciousness journey highlighting the ever-mounting mass of repeated cliches of various true-crime documentaries and series. Instead of a simple hit piece, however, Shackleton investigates why such familiarity often works on the viewer while ensuring you’ll never watch such a program the same way again. – Jordan R. (full review)
First Look 2025 takes place March 12-16 at the Museum of the Moving Image. Learn more here.