‘My First Film’: Failure can be fertile

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Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. There are moments when something is said in passing in a film, and it’s only a second later that you realise the world has spun off its axis. My favourite instance of this is in Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969), a fiction film with the raw materials of documentary, set during the 1968 anti-Vietnam protests in Chicago.

Someone lobs a Molotov cocktail at the National Guardsmen, which goes off near the camera. An offscreen voice warns: “Look out, Haskell, it’s real." The missile was real, the voice added in post-production. It’s a jolt when you watch the film the first time, and a pointed rebuke of the puritan standards that documentaries are often held to.

I felt a similar, if less dramatic, jolt during My First Film, another work erected on the border between fact and fiction. A young director, Vita, is recording a fund-raiser video for her debut production. She finishes, but the scene doesn’t end.

An off-screen voice calls cut. Other voices are heard as Vita changes posture, flexes her hands. An assistant walks in with a slate as someone says, “You want me to cut this, Z?" The opening scenes in My First Film are “Z"—director Zia Anger —goofing around on video.

But it’s been 45 minutes since, during which we’ve been watching Vita’s story: her voiceover, her memories of making her first film, Always All Ways, Anne Marie. It’s jarring, then, to be reminded that we’re watching Zia direct Odessa Young as Vita, who’s really Zia. Always All Ways, Anne Marie was an actual film, made by Anger in 2010 with a skeleton crew.

She completed it with difficulty and submitted it to the likely indie festivals. All of them rejected it. Anger moved on to make shorts and music videos for artists like