Review: My First Film (2024)
Metafictional meditation on a young filmmaker's failure and her way back in to filmmaking
My First Film (2024)
Written and directed by Zia Anger
Co-written by Billy Feldman
This fascinating metafictional story about a filmmaker’s failed feature project and how she found her way back to filmmaking is a remarkable piece of work. The movie (or “the film,” which throughout this review will refer to the one I’m reviewing here) has many narrative layers, and just as many visual ones. Furthermore, there are layers of character: there is Vita, the fictional alter ego of the filmmaker Zia Anger, played by Olivia Young; there is Dina (Devon Ross), the actress whom Vita hires to play her in the film she tells of making; there is Anne Marie (Deana LeBlanc), who plays the lead actress and Vita/Dina’s own alter ego in the film that Vita and Dina are making. (In the image above, Vita and her makeshift crew are filming Anne Marie’s climactic giving-birth scene.)
Each of these layers of cinematic truth/fiction have their own visual look; sometimes these visual signatures help the viewer understand where she is, and sometimes they come so fast that I couldn’t quite keep up. That’s where confidence in the filmmaker comes in, and that’s what I’ll talk about below.
First, though, some explanation. In the mid teens, Zia Anger, a music video director in her early-to-mid 20s, collected a makeshift crew and made a feature length movie, “Always All Ways, Anne Marie,” about a young woman who finds herself pregnant and leaves the artistic project she’s working on to search for her own missing mother, who abandoned her. This film was completed, and Anger submitted it to a lot of film festivals, which is what you do as an independent filmmaker to find a distributor. Every single film festival that she applied to rejected her application, and “Always All Ways, Anne Marie” languished in the can.
Frustrated, Anger staged a performance, called “My First Film,” about the aborted production. (I use that word advisedly — abortion is a theme throughout “My First Film” the movie, and presumably the stage performance, which according to press accounts involved Anger on stage presenting snippets from “Always All Ways, Anne Marie” along with spoken narration, projections of typed text, and other elements.) The performance, which toured both in person in 2018-19, and then virtually during the pandemic, salvaged footage from “Always” as well as behind-the-scenes footage and stills (I think?) to present the story captured in “Always,” tell the story of its production, and reflect on the festival rejection and Anger’s feelings of failure.
And I guess what happened — though this is merely implied in interviews with the filmmaker — is that someone with connections saw the performance and said “Well, okay, now this could be a movie.” And thus onto the making of “My First Film,” named after the performance piece, and the movie I’m reviewing here.
As one reviewer said, it takes more to explain this movie than to watch it and grok all its levels in real (movie) time, so I’m glad the explanation part of this review is over and I can move on to what’s great about this movie.
One of the things “My First Film” is about is collaboration. Vita (Odessa Young), the alter ego of filmmaker Zia Anger, starts with a bunch of friends as her crew. They’re friendly, pleasant, and seemingly up for anything. The same is true for the actors, including Dina (Devon Ross), who plays Vita in the film-within-a-film-within-a-film, and Cash (Abram Kurtz) as Vita’s boyfriend and, with his Redford-like square jaw and sandy blond hair, “the only member of the cast who might legitimately be a movie star” — in some other world where he wasn’t drunk all the time.
As the production goes along, two things happen. First, Vita’s fake-it-til-you-make-it director persona becomes increasingly thin as her lack of preparation shows itself. And second, it becomes really difficult to separate the crew of “Always” from its secondary actors. Meanwhile, Vita has her own boyfriend, Dustin (Philip Ettinger1). He gets her pregnant, and while he fails to take it seriously, the pregnancy is a crossroads for Vita.
Abortion, birth, and the parent-child relationship are a theme throughout “My First Film.” It begins with an older woman standing on a dock on a lake in upstate New York, the setting for the film. The woman performs a series of absurd movements; in voiceover, Vita informs us that this is one of her two mothers, that she is a mime, and that she is embodying the female reproductive system (it’s an act both hilarious and moving. I wish there were a still of that!), the functions of which viewers soon have further cause to consider.
At another point, Vita is filming a scene in which her alter ego Dina has become pregnant. When she announces this, a party breaks out, with Cash and the other actors exclaiming over and over “We’re having a baby!” (the viewer is reminded of the scene in “Cabaret” in which Liza Minelli and Michael York do the same). Everyone’s already drunk and stoned — a tactic which Vita, in her inexperience, chose because she wants to “Get to the real” — and chaos erupt. This is where it becomes impossible to separate the crew from the actors. When Vita tries to re-establish a semblance of order, she merely kills the party and ruins the shoot.
Later, when the production has fallen apart, she looks back on its happy early days when everyone was working so well, and realizes that those friendships were the most valuable things she had in her life, and that she alienated everyone by insisting they act professionally when she didn’t. Toward the end of the film, she flashes back to the day — captured in the image at the head of this review — when they shot the climactic scene in “Always.” In the scene, her alter ego Anne Marie gives birth. Vita remembers it and reconnects to it as a peak experience, re-experiences the ecstasy the scene evokes.
Remarkably — and here we get to the reason why “My First Film” is an amazing cinematic experience — this flashback is intercut with a parallel one in which Vita gets an abortion. That the abortion is staged in a realistic setting, with a gynecologist (Sarah Michelson) who talks Vita through the procedure and then acts out the whole thing — but in pantomime (which itself recalls Vita’s own mother ) — intercut with the scene of Anne Marie giving birth, is just amazing. This is the film’s climactic sequence, and these two intercut sequences provide Vita with the inspiration and resolve she needs to go forward and to make… “My First Film.”
I haven’t even mentioned the actor Ruby Max Fury, who plays Vita’s dad. An ancient hippie fag who has lived his whole adult life at the site of the commune he founded with compadres and comadres, Dad is relentlessly optimistic, having survived AIDS. (Footage of Vita caring for him during the period when he was ill with the disease, before the life-saving AIDS drugs were discovered and used, is also part of the movie.) Fury has a show-stopping screen presence; I felt as if I were seeing a saint — one who is constantly hitting a hash pipe as he dispenses gnomic wisdom.
The last shot is a tracking shot through the film’s interior set, where we see gathered the casts and crews of all three of the layered film productions, ending with the camera pointing at a mirror where we see Zia Anger and her cinematographer and other crew. It’s a shivery timelines-colliding moment. And it brings to mind a dream I keep having. I find myself in a company of men and women, we’re all in our late 30s or so. Sometimes we’re a theater company, sometimes community activists, sometimes a spiritual group. We love each other and practice constant support and encouragement of each other. Together we can do anything; together, we will do something amazing.
Sounds like a metacinema, with a dash of Inception-style layering of narratives. Can’t wait to watch this with you!