My First Film

Filmmaking about filmmaking has been an interest of the entertainment industry since its very inception. There is a specific fascination with the link between the artist and their personal life. Godard’s Contempt was a thinly veiled rumination on his relationship with Anna Karina. Spielberg’s The Fabelmans was a retrospective look into how his childhood shaped his love of film and made him one of the greats. Lynch’s Inland Empire, Innaritu’s Birdman, and Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard were all brilliant pieces about actors descending into their characters. There has been no lack of films about how our character shapes our art and how our art shapes our character, but a common link between these films is establishment. These works all come from filmmakers with years in the industry to weather down their experiences and narrow in on their understanding of the process.

Zia Anger is not an established filmmaker. She has worked for years but has never had the opportunity to direct a major Hollywood film. So while her aptly titled debut feature My First Film is also about the link between an artist and their personal life, it is told with a sense of raw pain. Anger examines her perceived failures and successes, focusing on both the catharsis she got from creating film and the pain she got from it not fully coming to fruition. 

The film follows Vita (Odessa Young), a woman still trying to make it as an artist 15 years after nothing came of her first attempt to make a film. As an adult, she is told by producers that she is too “esoteric” to get an opportunity to even work on small projects. And as a girl, her project is misunderstood and looked down upon by her own crew. For the crew, it is a meaningless job that requires minimum effort. For Vita, it is her primary coping mechanism with the chaos that is her daily life. For Zia, writing the screenplay serves a similar purpose: to grapple with and understand the aftermath that is her life.

Vita’s film follows a character with a similar family, similar traumas, and similar wishes to her. She tells everyone that the story is about a young woman coming of age, while simultaneously her own story is a young woman coming of age. She doesn’t attempt to hide the similarities; she just pretends they don’t exist—a happy coincidence, that’s all. When Vita asks her lead actress Dina (Devon Ross) to give the perfect scream, she is the only person who can understand what the character needs to convey in that scene. For a moment, there’s temporary catharsis. Dina gets the scream right, and it seems as though all is well. Everyone is finally on Vita’s wavelength. She is seen.

But after an accident happens, Vita is left alone save for Dina. Much like in her own life, Vita has been reduced to working with scraps, relying on largely herself. Before this film, Zia went through a similar experience where she spent years putting together a live show that recollected the same memories pulled from for this film. However, this time she is approaching her film with an experience for unexperience. It thus serves as a reminder for anyone watching and even for herself that we have all messed up before, that we have all needed to move on from something we put our all into. The film cuts between Vita’s life as she makes her first film, the film itself, and her life in the future as she sits down to write about it. There is an open dialogue between filmmaker and character that I have never seen put to film before and moments where you can feel how the world has been translated from life to pen to screen. 

Odessa Young is given the complicated job of portraying Vita through the eyes of Vita and implicitly Zia through the eyes of Zia. Yet she never feels inauthentic in her role. Rather, she feels like an extension of the personality created through the writing and the vibrant filmmaking. Vita is a product of everything that makes Zia an artist and a human. 

The thesis of the film comes within the final sequence, where Zia boldly introduces herself to the narrative, asserting herself as the person Vita had been writing to the whole runtime. It is there where she makes the statement, “It will end, but you will make something again.” It serves as a final reminder for the audience and for herself that she survived. She’s survived the pain of womanhood, the pain of failure, the pain of no one understanding her. But now she has made something again, and she has finally made something good. All of the failure she’s ruminated on for the past 100 minutes has turned into a masterpiece, a defining piece of debut filmmaking and authentic artistry that we haven’t seen in a long while.

Zia Anger is the future of filmmaking, but she wants you to know that there was a time that she couldn’t even get a real crew to work with her. In a time where there’s so much pessimism about the industry and where even legends struggle to find work, My First Film is a powerful reminder that it is originality and genuineness that makes an artist good. As long as you learn from your art, it can never truly be bad. 

10/10