Zia Anger’s film turns personal storytelling into a meditation on unfinished dreams and the creative self.
By Sarah G. Vincent/Boston Movie News
If you are considering watching “Close Your Eyes” (2023), a film about a director whose last movie never got finished, then you must see “My First Film,” a drama about a young woman director, Vita (Odessa Young), an onscreen surrogate for director and co-writer Zia Anger, whose completed first feature film never had an audience. Like her protagonist, Anger’s feature debut, “Always All Ways, Anne Marie,” is listed on IMDb as abandoned, never released, so the line between fiction and reality is blurred. Vita reflects on the creation of this labor of love involving family, friends, lovers, and neighbors near Lavender Hill and Silver Lake, the birthplace of Cayuga Pictures, and her experience as a woman with a “little boy dream” of becoming a filmmaker. There are many movies about directors, but not many of those directors are women, except for “The Blair Witch Project” (1999), and few about director’s aborted projects. Like her horror counterpart, Vita’s ambition comes at a cost but also renews her allegiance to herself and distills what she needs to go forward. It also becomes a universal story of women trying to escape the gravitational pull of biology to become human beings.
The first eight minutes toggle between Vita trying to fill a blank page on her laptop and showing clips of videos probably made on Anger’s cell phone. Vita then segues into self-abasement for money while pitching her miming mom’s idea. When she fails to land the gig, Vita meditates on how people want films about women if they were more male. These scattered scenes reflect Vita’s uncertainty over how to commence her story and may alienate some viewers, but hang in there if you feel like running. You will find your footing and discover the method to Anger’s madness once the story starts to depict the making of Vita’s film, which begins with a youthful exuberance that gradually fades throughout the shoot as artistic demands clash with others’ expectations of how Vita or a director should act. Vita meditates, “I don’t feel female until someone tells me I am.” She makes huge, reckless mistakes but also gets undermined and has a thinner margin for error in her personal and professional life. It is a tale of youthful hubris and disillusionment of expectations versus results.
There is a lyrical power to “My First Film” as it unfolds, complete with a chorus that expands with each chapter to reveal the plot twists in Vita’s story and her film. Vita acts as the narrator and contrasts which elements from Anger’s autofiction story are autobiographical or fiction: mother abandonment, dying fathers, pregnancy. It is all very meta but never annoying because the protagonist’s emotions are so palpable. Anger interweaves her themes out of chronological order without confusing her audience: brushes with death, the joy of collective creation, and the pain of being reduced to one’s biological existence. Her visual acumen makes the film a way for Vita to talk to herself as Anger refracts Vita’s image without the use of a mirror, almost like a double exposure. The narration is more like a memoir for the author to interrogate her younger self’s motives, but when the scene depicts what happens, Anger reveals that Vita is an unreliable narrator and is not as considerate as she thought she was. It is refreshing to have a flawed woman character. Vita does not have to be likable for an audience to relate to her. She is human and calls herself out. Anger depicts how the passage of time and the creation of art reveal what a younger version missed and lost.
“My First Film” captures how Vita begins to lose people on her journey to become a filmmaker. Each supporting character feels real as if Anger made a documentary: Dustin (Philip Ettinger), the smitten boyfriend who ends up being the kind of guy who proposes to his girlfriend at the podium when graduating; JJ (Cole Doman), Vita’s confidant and the free spirit designer, Dina (Devon Ross), the actor and Vita’s muse, Alexis (Jane Wickline), the no-nonsense cinematographer, and Sam (Seth Steinberg), the baby-faced, earnest producer. Anger excels at recreating the group dynamic gradually crumbling, especially the awkwardness of the crew as they involuntarily get front-row seats to Vita’s realization that one of them is sabotaging Vita through her film—think the opposite of “The Fall Guy.”
The film is so free from judgment that as each person peels away, though the intention may differ, their departure does not feel like condemnation but distillation. Even when isolated, Vita is never truly alone, and the biggest plot twist is which person will be revealed as her soul mate—another pretty woman who wants to be more than the one that guys want to bed. Ambition comes full circle and functions as a transcendent life vest from despair. The community crumbles and rebuilds but never entirely goes away.
“My First Film” is ultimately a story about giving birth to yourself and reimagining how success looks. As Vita gradually stops caring about acting like a director and being one, she can exchange neurosis for gratitude and confront the sides of herself that she keeps secret, including her experiences as an AFAB young woman who has an abortion. Anger uses her film to tell stories that no one talks about, such as unwanted pregnancies and films without an audience. Both stories climax into stories of love.
It is customary for birth scenes to be joyous and tie everyone in the present to those who came before. The abortion scene is unexpectantly poignant, soothing, and not graphic because the actors use motions to mimic the process, which feels like a bookend full circle of Vita’s miming mom. The image of the Nurse (Joanna Fang) flashes periodically throughout the film, so finally getting to see the entire scene is cathartic. The Doctor (Sarah Michelson) finally reveals Vita’s origin story, which is teased periodically throughout “My First Film” and is not anticlimactic. Given the United States’ current attitude towards women’s bodily autonomy and LGBTQ+ people’s right to exist and redefine family, this scene feels like a gentle reminder of how intimate and personal the act of procreation, conception, abortion, and carrying a child to term is. In addition, the process is framed as just as collaborative and more nurturing than the act of making a film.
Only one of Anger’s creative choices is puzzling: why does Vita’s movie, and by extension, Anger’s movie, give more screen time and lines to Dad (Ruby Max Fury) than Vita’s two mothers? Vita’s physicality and storytelling technique feel related to her mimicking her mom. The assumption could be that she has a closer interpersonal relationship with Dad because she worries that she can lose him, but it feels unclear, and with any relationship, it does not have to be.
In the future, film history scholars will look back and puzzle over the fact that “My First Film” went straight to streaming, especially compared to most of its big-screen counterparts. It is so obviously a work of genius. Let’s hope Anger has more opportunities to commit her vision to feature films.
‘My First Film’
Rating: Not rated
Cast: Odessa Young, Devon Ross
Director: Zia Anger
Writers: Zia Anger, Billy Feldman
Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes
Where to watch: Mubi, Fandango At Home, Prime Video
Grade: A-
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