My First Film
Written by Zia Anger and Billy Feldman
Directed by Zia Anger
Starring Odessa Young, Devon Ross, and Philip Ettinger
Runtime 100 minutes
Unrated
Streams on MUBI September 6

by Kate Beach, Staff Writer

Vita (Odessa Young) is making a bad movie. It’s thin and incoherent, full of inscrutable shots posturing as artsy, and hardly any screenplay. It is…her first film. The act of looking back on it with the benefit of age and experience forms the structure of My First Film, Zia Anger’s dreamy, heartfelt sort-of directorial debut.  

The first film in question is eventually called Always All Ways, Anne Marie, and it exists both in My First Film and in the real world. Anger shot it at 25, submitted it to over one hundred film festivals, and was rejected from all of them. She points out that the project is considered “abandoned” by IMDb. If that’s the case, and if no one’s really seen it, does it even exist? Is Always All Ways, Anne Marie Anger’s first film, or is it My First Film? Does it matter?  

The making of Always All Ways, Anne Marie is the narrative inside My First Film, as Anger looks back at the fraught, emotional, and joyous experience of creating something with other people. Joy is as much a part of Anger’s experience as everything else that went into creating this film. “I thought the first thing you should see is joy,” she narrates in the opening frames, as she types the same words onto a laptop. “Because I am really happy you’re watching this. Happier than you could ever know.” Creating is one thing. Knowing that thing you created is being seen by someone, anyone, is another.

Before diving into the narrative at the center of the film, Anger takes us on a brief tour of her dealings with film as a business. After sweatily pitching a film in which she recreates her mime mother’s interpretation of menstruation, the execs in the room shower her with praise, followed by weeks of silence, then finally a rejection. We watch Anger bump up against creating art and making a product, and while it’s a story that’s existed as long as art and commerce, Anger makes it feel fresh and compelling.  

Odessa Young’s Vita is the Anger stand-in for the narrative portions of the film. We pick up with her on the road back to her hometown to shoot her movie, having assembled a crew of friends, an actress she hopes will become a muse (Devon Ross) and her obnoxious boyfriend (Philip Ettinger.) Young is a force in the role, existing at the center of the chaotic film shoot, regularly the cause of the chaos herself. As Vita attempts to realize her vision and lead her crew, she also grapples with memory and desire and what she’s actually trying to accomplish. She’s convinced that no one cares as much about the film as she does, and that might be true, but that belief keeps her from accepting that her friends, willing to travel and work for free, actually care about making something good together. 

The film slips in and out between the making of Always All Ways, Anne Marie and Anger at her computer in the present day, revisiting the shoot. She weaves the two timelines together seamlessly, slipping back and forth between them while also splicing in other moments from Anger’s life and work. It’s messy on purpose, admittedly esoteric (pronounced by Anger as “ass-oteric”) and it shoves together a lot of themes (creativity, failure, the female experience) that it doesn’t always have time to fully untangle. But what Anger makes in the attempt is bold and expressive, and an unflinching look at her own shortcomings as both an artist and a human.  

My First Film is a hyper-meta look not just at the art of filmmaking, but the act of making anything with anyone. Near the end of the film, Vita closes her eyes and tilts her face into the sun, savoring a moment surrounded by her film crew. Anger’s voiceover intones “Just for a moment I stopped caring, because it was so beautiful just to be making something with people.” In examining her failed attempt to announce herself as an auteur, Anger ultimately created a celebration of the life-affirming act of collaboration.