My First Film is not Zia Anger’s first film, and it isn’t a documentary either, which is what it sounds and looks like it’s going to be. Nor is it formidable, which its meta-sounding title suggests it might be.
In fact it’s a surprisingly easy and enjoyable watch. Though it does start off in an esoteric direction – “assoteric”, Anger calls it – with a rough collage of staged recollection, old home movie footage and words typewritten on the screen designed to recall meetings Anger had with a production company to direct a film about, more or less, how tough it is being a woman. Something, she eventually realised, she just didn’t want to do.
And so, instead, she set out to make a film about the making of her first film, Always All Ways, Anne Marie, which is described as “abandoned” on the IMDb, and which we later learn was submitted to 50 film festivals, every single one of which turned it down.
And, once she’s got this bit of throat-clearing out of the way, and left the YouTube collage style behind, that’s what My First Film details, in painful, sometime joyous, dramatised recollections, the sheer slog of making a movie on no budget, using friends and neighbours as cast and crew and keeping the show on the road by force of will.
“This is really good, isn’t it”, I wrote in my notes halfway through. And it is. In a montage-y, highly personalised way that sometimes recalls Guy Maddin and other times Robert Altman, Anger gives us dramatic snapshots as Vita (explicitly a stand-in for Anger) puts together Always All Ways, Anne Marie, from dealing with props and actors who just don’t get it, to a mutinous and often stoned crew, a muse who’s gone Awol and a boyfriend who becomes harder to deal with the more Vita asserts herself.
Another reference point might be Sarah Polley’s remarkable documentary of sorts Stories We Tell, in which the actor/director spun a fable about her childhood which, the longer she spun, the more untrustworthy it seemed to become.
Here, Anger first tells us that Always All Ways, Anne Marie was an autobiographical story about a woman dealing with her dying father and then setting out to track down the mother who abandoned her, before eventually admitting that her father wasn’t dying and her mother didn’t abandon her.
It could be arch but in fact it feels really fresh and that comes down in large part to the extremely loose performances of a great ensemble, but particularly Odessa Young as Vita, who is so in the zone that I forgot she was playing a role and just accepted she was a young film-maker (a brief appearance by the real Zia Anger helps acts as a corrective).
There is a big metaphor running throughout, about pregnancy and unborn children being like unfinished movies, and the film also undoubtedly gets a boost from the fact that Odessa Young is a good-looking young woman who exudes can-do and, yes, the vitality of Vita.
Vitality is the impression that Anger leaves behind as she self-consciously bows out on her film about her other film by swinging the real boom mike into shot and spinning her camera about to reveal the crew behind the scenes, as well as the rest of the team in the corridor outside. She set out to make a film about the slog and joy of film-making and that’s what achieved. Her film is a triumph and now, with Mubi behind it, she’s entitled to ask – who needs film festivals?
My First Film – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
