Reseñas de la crítica

It’s as personal and experimental as the live presentations, but mixes fiction (or perhaps autofiction) into the recipe, producing something that looks and acts a little more like a traditional movie.

This cinematic collage, part coming-of-age drama and part confessional essay, is a true cinematic ouroboros. In a time when venerable male directors have used origin stories to show what made them filmmakers (Roma, The Fabelmans, Belfast) and women have mined their adolescence for painful life lessons (Lady Bird, After Sun) Anger has managed to pull off both at the same time. It’s hard to watch and not admire both her commitment and chutzpah.

By the end... you can’t help but admire Anger’s audacity, sly humour and film-making chops.

My First Film, a fantastic “feature debut” that is grappling with an unreleased prior film and an extension of her solo performance which is now also one of the most surprising, layered films of the year. It’s the meta movie to end all meta movies.

Calling to mind modern masters like Josephine Decker, Joanna Hogg and Mia Hansen-Love, Anger pulls liberally from her own life while opening up a new mode of cinematic storytelling.

Transformation may be the defining feature of Anger’s approach to storytelling in the way she invites it, both as a performer and as director... My First Film is a fascinating exploration of cinematic language and the myriad of ways the camera can literally inhabit a narrative.

A playfully self-aware film-within-a-film, My First Film... is always driven by director/creator Zia Anger’s refined and astute sense of what she is trying to deliver, and given energy by a cast and crew that buy into her vision... Anger does a remarkable job at wrestling the various styles, elements and tones together, and delivers an affecting and insightful film.

My First Film — a wildly imaginative, almost disorientingly complex and unapologetically sincere film — is a testament to the collective energy necessary for all creation... It’s the supreme accomplishment of this film that, by the end, you don’t feel pressured to interpret or rationalise [its] improbable scenario, but instead experience it as if it were the real thing.

As much as anything, My First Film feels like an experiment in radical honesty, a confrontation of the pains and pleasures that make up the work of creating art.

My First Film as, yes, a self-reflection on failure, but also as a critique of the barriers to entry faced by many independent filmmakers. Chiefly the need to ask again and again for money on platforms like GoFundMe and the institutional sexism that continues to permeate the film festival circuit.

Anger has an incisive sense of humor about her failures, especially about her first film, which she concedes may not actually be her first film because nobody saw it. If a movie is never viewed, is it even a movie?

In My First Film, Anger critiques the flawed system that’s shaped her career. More importantly, she gives herself the space and agency to find out what it is she wants to say with her art when she doesn’t seek approval from the outside world.