Director: Zia Anger
Memory and invention blur together in this experimental drama about the impossible mess of making a debut feature.
What is My First Film about?
A young filmmaker looks back on the ordeal of shooting her first feature, and the further she goes the less the timeline behaves. Crew disputes, borrowed locations, and a shoot that seems to fall apart daily sit next to scenes that feel invented after the fact, as if she is rewriting her own past to make sense of it. Past, present, and imagined future keep folding into one another, so a rehearsal can slide into a memory and a memory can slide into something that never happened at all. Rather than settling into a tidy behind-the-scenes account, the film treats the act of creation itself as the real subject — messy, self-doubting, and reshaped every time it's retold. What emerges is less a making-of story than a meditation on how any first attempt at art gets mythologized by the person who lived through it.
Cast & crew
Odessa Young plays the filmmaker at the story's center, with Devon Ross and Cole Doman among a cast that includes Sage Ftacek, Jane Wickline, Seth Steinberg, Abram Kurtz, and Jackson Anthony filling out the shoot she's remembering.
Context & significance
Written and directed by Zia Anger, My First Film is a 2024 UK-US co-production shot through with an autobiographical, essay-film sensibility rather than conventional narrative drama. At 100 minutes, it moves at a deliberately unstable pace, matching form to its subject by refusing to separate the film being made from the film being watched. Its structure owes as much to live performance art, where Anger built earlier versions of this same material, as it does to traditional feature filmmaking.
Where & how to watch
My First Film is available on K-Time with a free account login; anyone can read this page without signing in first. K-Time's Farsi interface and Persian-language catalog are built for the Iranian diaspora, giving festival-circuit dramas like this one a home alongside broader international titles.