My First Film

press release: MMoCA’s Spotlight Cinema features premieres of critically acclaimed and award-winning documentary and feature films. This year’s series includes Lucio Castro’s End of the Century, an alluring art-house romance set in sunsoaked Barcelona. End of the Century begins with a seemingly casual hookup that spirals backward and forward into a decades-spanning relationship with no clear beginning or end. Lucio Castro’s open-ended meditation on missed connections and lives shared is a kindred spirit of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise series.

Admission is free for MMoCA members and $7 per screening for the general public. Ticket sales begin at 6:30 pm in the museum’s lobby. Spotlight Cinema is curated by Mike King, and is a program of MMoCA’s education department. Visit mmoca.org/mmoca-cinema for details.

OCTOBER 23, 2019 • 7 PM: My First Film (2019, USA, 75 min., Digital)

Dir: Zia Anger – Filmmaker in person!

My First Film is a feature-length multimedia performance in which filmmaker Zia Anger interacts with media on screen and the audience using real-time text, spontaneous Google searches, audience directives and AirDrops. Through the performance, Anger probes and dissects her “abandoned” works to re-imagine the relationship between the audience, the filmmaker, the movie theater and cinema and erases the line between a filmmaker’s corporeal body and their body of work. A vital, singular, innovative work that explores what it means to be a woman and an artist, the project showcases Anger’s sensibilities and pushes the boundaries of cinematic experience.

“Vastly imaginative… the entirety of Anger’s performance of My First Film is a deeply moving and distinctive creation in itself. An extraordinary movie event.”  - The New Yorker 

“A reclamation of a ‘failed’ work and a rebuke of the independent film industry’s standards for success, My First Film plies the formal limits of a theatrical experience.” - Filmmaker Magazine

“A cathartic collective experiment in what it might mean to challenge failure, recalibrate it, and reclaim it anew.” - Sight & Sound