My First Film (official trailer)
Opens 9/20 at Metrograph: http://metrograph.com/film/film/2071/...
MEMORY and Cinema Guild proudly present the international tour of Zia Anger’s MY FIRST FILM: an expanded cinema performance in which the artist attempts to recount the stories behind her lost and abandoned work - including her first feature.
From Zia Anger, “Last year I Googled myself. I found my IMDB page, which listed my first attempt at a feature film as still being in “post-production.” In the interest of mitigating the risk of any potential financiers coming along and seeing that I had a film from 2012 still unfinished I emailed IMDB to ask if they could remove the listing. It had been automatically added when I used Withoutabox to apply to festivals and without proper release, the entry sat in limbo. I never heard back, and a month later I checked my page again, and was surprised to learn that instead of removing the listing, they had labeled it ‘abandoned' in red italic letters.
“My First Film” explores this “abandoned” mythos - from expired Instagram stories, to the nearly-finished feature I made in grad school. It erases the line drawn between a filmmaker's body and body of work. Lasting roughly 75 minutes, MY FIRST FILM reimagines the relationship between the audience, the filmmaker, the movie theatre, and the cinematic narrative, as I weave a narrative using real-time text, spontaneous Google searches, audience directives and AirDrops.”