Nestled in our list of most-anticipated 2024 premieres was Zia Anger’s My First Film, a spin on / expansion of / who-can-say from her much-lauded shorts My First Film (2015) and My Last Film (2019). Ahead of the feature’s theatrical release from MUBI, there’s a first teaser in which Anger direct-addresses us, the prospective viewer, on a film “[about] the first one (and other stuff).” Mixing vertical footage familiar to anyone on social media with sequences more abundant in production value (featuring Odessa Young and Devon Ross), it helps us understand what she’s intending… to some degree.
As Frank Falisi said in our 2024 preview, “How to anticipate something you’re not sure of? Is the word always ‘anxiety’? What room exists for the unknown to be experienced without ever being known, to feel something like ‘good,’ even when prodding the failure to be known? Or: if you’ve made My First Film (2019) after My Last Film (2015), isn’t it time to make My First Film (2024) again? Zia Anger, one of our most turbulent / turbulently joyous prodders of the moving image, returns to excavating abandonment, this time (?) with the veneer of fiction (?) wrap-warped around Odessa Clark in front of the camera and Ashley Connor behind it. I don’t know what it will be. I’ll be there––isn’t ‘anticipating’ a movie just sitting in the dark, and then light?”
Find the preview below: