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Hey, folks, welcome to a special episode of the Projection Booth. This is your host, Mike White. I am joined once again by Edo Choi and Eric Hines, two of the programmers at the MOMI First Look Festival. The festival is happening this year March twelfth through March sixteenth over at the Museum of the Moving Image. Had a great time talking with Ato and Eric yet another great batch of films that they have curated for us to see this year. Check out everything over at movingimage dot org and just
search for First Look twenty twenty five. You'll find the whole program, as well as where you can get passes and how much those are. Thank you so much for listening, and I hope you enjoyed this interview. Eric and Edo, thank you so much for joining me again today. I'm super excited to talk about this latest First Look festival. Gosh, remind me how many years have you been doing this now?
This is the fourteenth year of Wower of Worse Look, and it's the tenth year that I've been a part of, so it had to be strong four years before I even got there, and now we're looking at fourteen, So very on the cusp of the fifteenth en verse.
I kind of use you guys as my canary and Nicole mine. As far as the state of new films festivals, the work all year going out looking at new things, bringing in the best of the best to have this festival. What was your experience like this year? Feels like everything's back now. Are we open across the board? Are you still virtual festing?
Very much back, very much traveling, And honestly, all but Sundance has abandoned online in any significant way. There are a few festivals that still will do once the festival proper is done in first and they'll do a little online version, but really Sundance is the only one that's continuing to do online availability during the course of the festival. So no fully in person Ato and I made our way around quite a bit, I can say for myself.
I went to can and Docufest in Kosovo, Millennium, Doxkan's Gravity in Warsaw, if An Amsterdam, doc Leipzig in Germany, and on at over the spots that I'm missing that you went to.
I only went to one festival I think this year I went to, but it was a big It was Venice. I quite enjoyed myself and saw one movie that we brought to the festival, which is Israel Palestine on Swedish TV, which hopefully we'll get to talk about more today.
Yeah. The way that Ed and I do it is that we certainly do a fair amount of watching links and getting sent things, but we also really like to not rely on that and find things on our own that we're interested in that we think would be a good fit first look. I think the good thing is that as first look goes along, we get sent things people walk to play with us. But also not good
at rest and think that everybody's coming our way. There are still films and filmmakers and festivals that were not as familiar with us, so we can make our presence known.
I'd also ask about the themes that you might have seen throughout the year, some of these new films. Obviously, when we talked a few years ago, we were talking a lot about Ukraine and just the situation there. We've been undergoing the Israeli Palestine conflict for over a year now. But I'm curious, apart from just more torn stuff, but what kind of trends are you guys seeing as far as the films that are out there, if any.
One thing, I'll say before we get to some discernible trends, one thing that we're also conscious of is to not follow those trends to slavishly or because you know, put it this way, a couple of years ago, the Ukraine films were multiple and important. We're also made a point to pick up a film this year that's an extraordinary film about the war in Ukraine that I think that has been overlooked because other festivals are a little done with it. But I feel like that trend was a
couple of years ago. But war doesn't really work that way. I think programming should work that way either. So we're showing this film that ETO saw in Venice called Sums of Slow Burning Earth, which is extraordinary and so glad that we have an opportunity to show it. It is both a harrowing picture of war but also at the same time almost just be basically exquisitely made and has a sequence in there that's probably the most powerful as
scene of any film coming out of that conflict. So just noting that there are new trends, but there's also things that maybe others think are no longer in trend, but we make sure that if the films are strong, that we make space for them.
I think that there are trends in programming as much as there are trends in movies, and we definitely try, in our kind of modest facitating to push the envelope a little bit in terms of trying to, you know, veer away from some of the trends that we see in these larger festivals that we visit around the world.
And I would say, when it comes to Slow Burning Earth, the Ukrainian film that we're so proud to be representing that Eric just described so beautifully, it's a film that I think was taken for granted, even in the sense that people just saw it in a lineup and then
didn't actually go to see it. That I attended the world premiere screening of that film at Venice, and frankly it was a little under attended relative capacity in that room, and actually the other film I mentioned from Venice, Israel Palestine on Swedish TV, also a little undertended for a world premiere. These are big rooms, so it's all relative. But I do think it kind of points to a certain fatigue that people have with some of the storylines
that they see in the news. But these are really important stories, obviously, and the films more even more importantly, are very good treatments of these subjects and they're very illuminating.
Ones mentioned the Israel Palestine on Swedish TV. Can you talk a little bit more about that, because I mentioned the conflict that's going on, But this comes at things a little bit differently.
The filmmaker Goren Hugo Olsen has been making arkibal films for several years now and has developed quite a reputation as a master of arkibol, a foot in filmmaking and research, and he's best known for a film that he made I think over a decade ago now called The Black Power Mixtape. And I was, you know, quite honestly surprised that this latest film from him, especially considering that it's on such an important subject, hasn't been out of Venice.
It hasn't traveled as much.
We're going to be giving it its us premier and so I'm very proud of that for us.
And it's just power.
What Lauren does is that he allows this very rich trove of archival material to speak for itself and to tell a story that can't be reduced to one narrative or another interests narrative or another. And I think, you know, it's kind of immense achievement what he's done.
With That would add to that too, is that what's interesting about it is he's good at this in terms of his other prior films that he takes what it could is a limitation of an archive or the parameters of an archive, and lets that define what it is. In this sense, it is exactly what's in the title right. This is basically how Swedish team it covered this conflict over the course of forty years, and so what you
get is how that coverage evolves over times. You get the history of the concept b you also get this kind of third element, which is the sort of Swedish coverage of it. And so it allows you, as a viewer, I think, to approach this topic in a way they couldn't otherwise, which is sort of look over people's shoulders as they make their way through time. Like that really unique experience to watch this them.
Another film that plays with limitations that is going to be playing at the festival is Zodiac Keller Project. Can you talk a little bit about that, because trying to describe this film it's a little bit of a challenge, but it's so interesting and so much fun to watch.
So this is Charlie Shackleton, who I think in my ten years at the festival, maybe this is the sixth time had him. I think that's the record. I can't imagine there being a different record. Maybe I don't knows of somebody else who maybe in the experimental circles who even beats that. But Charlie's, again, the as far as I'm concerned, like the ideal first look filmmaker in this sense that he's changing every single year. It seems project to project what he does and how he does it.
He thinks about the form, he thinks about the implications of form, and he is also in conversation with what popular culture is doing. He made a film with Fear Itself, which is about it kind of dissecting horror films and making an archival film that is an essay in horror films, and the so called beyond Clueless, examining the legacy of clueless.
He's played in VR, he's done live live performance work, and last year he did a three D film that kind of takes on the sort of mechanics of three D. This is in some ways, I totally say what you're saying, Mike,
but it's someways it's hard to describe. In other ways, it's almost like too simple, in the sense that he was trying to make a true crime film with his own take on it, and was looking to license the rights of a book written by a police officer who was or a detective who was involved in the Zodiac killer chase at some point, and got funding, got it all set up as even found locations, and then the rights just didn't come through, And so, rather than abandoning
the project as most people would in that situation, being Charlie, he decides to dance a tightrope around telling you the film that she would have made and sometimes showing you the things he would have done, while constantly telling you where he may be going too far. In terms of
violating the right right. So it's about there is information there about the Zodiac Killer who the book at its core, but it's also about the challenges of adaptation, and also about true crime as a culture right now and what it does to documentary film and how dominant it is in questioning that along the way. So it does what you're saying, all these things at the same time, and yet on its core it's basically I'm going to tell you a story about a film I can't make.
I love that experimental nature of things and just having the movie opening with that parking lot and saying what would have happened? And I just love that. So many of these films are just pushing that envelope and really giving you something that you wouldn't see obviously at like an your mainstream multipleax. Another one that I really enjoyed was A Frown Gone Mad. The approach to that topic was very interesting as well.
I'm so glad you mentioned that Edo and I are both really excited about that one. I'd seen it at IFA in Amsterdam and I was pretty much convinced that we have to do this. This is so good, this is so perfect for us. But also being aware that it's the sort of film maybe not as surprising as say, Israel Pal Scienceweos TV. Not that's surprising that it hasn't had more play at festivals, but this maybe less surprising,
just simply because of the content. It's not easy to watch, but I'm so glad when Eto saw it as well and was immediately responded to it. It's another one that's very simple and minimalists in its approach. It's a single frame, basically looking at the chair in a beauty shop in Beirut, and what you're watching is people getting fillers and botox injections while having conversations with the beautician and chit chat that you would have in any kind of stylist shop
about what's going on in the world outside. And it really becomes apparent that contrast between the micro control that is going on in terms of people's appearances versus what's out of control in Beroot and outside the walls is what it's playing with.
Olmar, the filmmaker, deals with allowing the space of the film to open out onto other things. It's a very restricted space that he presents to you. It's just the space of this particular corner of this botox parlor beautician parlor, but through the dialogues between the customers and woman who's giving them their botox injections, the space of the film opens out onto a much larger and geopolitically spraught reality
that everyone's day to day lives are embroiled in. And that's a really exciting aspect of the film is that through something so small, it can address very large issues.
To be a little slip about this, if there's a body horror documentary out there, there's a good chance that I do, and I have the stomach to program it. So it challenged to filmmakers out there.
It reminded me at times of that movie. I think you guys showed it a few years of the apartment move where it was all taking place from the guy's balcony. I think it actually was called Balcony.
Oh, the Balcony movie.
Yeah, just that whole idea of slice of.
The world, slice of the world through a particularly restricted angle, and yet so much has shown over the course of time. Yeah, I love factly, what are.
Some of the other films that you guys are excited to show? I know, obviously these are all your babies, so you can't just say, oh, all of them, but tell me some of the other ones that you're just like, Wow.
I can't wait for more people to check this out.
I'm particularly excited about Yoko Yamanaka's Desert of Namibia. Yamanaka is a fairly young I would go so far as say a prodigiously young filmmaker. She's under thirty and this is already her second feature. She made her first feature when she was twenty. She dropped out of film school to make it, and this follow up, this sophomore after it, I think has taken her a while to make because
she's now twenty eight years old. But it features a young, very popular star in Japan, and the film deals with you could say it deals with mental illness or someone who probably has either borderline personality or by disorder. However, that would be to limit the emotional, psychological, and expressive
suppleness of the movie and what it's doing. The character, the young woman twenty one years old who's navigating the stresses of intimate relationships and personal and professional life in Tokyo in the present day, doesn't actually seek any kind of professional help until near the end, and when that diagnosis arrives, it doesn't derive as sort of something to
put a label on what she's going through. It arrives as at further question about who she is, And so the film isn't so much about suffering from some sort of deviant condition. It's about actually the respect the way in which all of us are dealing with trying to discover who we are amid a very constantly kind of rupturing modern existence. It very much deals with in a way that I've never seen a film yet, because Generation
Z filmmakers are all still very young. It deals with the experience of the rhythm I hyped up but also slightly disassociated rhythm of young people's wives today, and it finds formal correlatives for that. It's a kind of shape shifting movie. A lot of it is shot hand held, but then gradually she starts introducing locked off, more distance shots on a tripod, and then sometimes there are these there's bounds that feel like they're almost out of nowhere
that kind of interrupt the composition that you're watching. And then slowly there are superb positions between scenes that are hard to explain, and then eventually it even goes into kind of a surreal territory in the last kind of act of the film, and it's just really thrilling filmmaking, and it's really amazing to see this from someone that young and something so confident and so brash and also seemingly thematically daring. There's no limit to where she'll go.
You could even say it's like a gen Z Cassavetti's approach to a portrait of a woman in the sense that you can't really tell at any moment if it's a comedy or if it's something more serious, and not knowing how to approach her as a character is similar to challenging you as a viewer to not visionhole or either, which I think is also part of what Cassavetti's project was really fantastic film. We saw that out of Doctor's
Fortnite and Ken. Another film that I would put out there another portrait of a woman which is a want in her as a documentary that we saw out of Ifa by the Irish filmmaker Myrat Carton, who works more in some more experimental terrain, but this is something more of a straightforward documentary, and it's a portrait of her mother who is suffering from alcoholism and mental illness, and
at various points goes missing. And so Mari's the daughter who's had to parent her own mother for a lot of her life, taking a break from her own life and her own concerns to care for her mother and all the complicated things that come up from that. For anybody who's experienced anything like that with a parent, a relative, there's something here that's never I've never really seen in terms of finding a language or trying to find a language to articulate all these complexities in terms of love
and affection, adoration and also just disgust and impatience. And even though it's closer to a observation where we've been talking head documentary at times, part of that searching for a language winds up being she does these experiments inside the apartment where she's just making this banal space something stranger and threatening even and trying to find angles within
this space. It almost comes off as just doodling, but doodling that is a comes from like a real psychic we damaged and challenged place really unique and was excited because I was just at the True False film Fest last weekend, and that's the film. It also played there, and that's the film that people seem to be most excited about and blown away by. So I'm excited that we're showing.
It in New York and that folks that we catch up to it. I love how so many of these films are just going past what we feel like films are, and like you said, pushing that envelope being very avant garde. But then also one of the films that you are showing looks back at a older avant garde film and
in a new way. The fifth Shot of Laete, that was one of the very first experimental films I remember seeing in college, and so to have that explored from a different angle, I've found that to be fascinating as well.
This is Dolnique Cabrera, French hillmaker who's well renowned and made a lot of films over time, both sort of an observential mode, but then it also makes films that are more personal. This is more on the personal side of her filmmaking. But as you say, in taking on pretty widely known other film Lagite Chris Markers, and its approach on it is so unique and it almost like
playfully takes on the mode of a detective film. It takes place mostly in an editing suite, and in a that editing suite, there's basically the discovery of a relative,
a cousin of hers, that he's actually in Lageta. The fifth shot of Lagtay and if you've seen the film, like there are only so many shots, so they're all pretty iconic, and it's a shot of a young man and parents looking at the airport watching planes come in, and takes that playing and expands on that to look into the making of the film, look into the conditions around the making of the film, what was happening in France and Algeria at that time, and really honing in
on to this moment when so many Francophone folk who were either working or born in Algeria were coming back to France because of the revolution, and that site in the airport, Charles de Gaul airport, I actually don't know if it was called Charles Degaul at that time, but whatever, that airport and and anyway, that moment in time, and it winds up getting deep into her own family history, deep into the sort of racial and colonial elements of her family and of France at that time, and also
plays like I said it was like a detective movie should try to discern if this is actually members of her family and if they're threaded together with Chris Marker in that way. So I mean so thrilling. If you've seen Laja detay to see this film. I also I saw at doc Leipzig and saw it with an intern who had never seen Lagete before, and she was also totally gripped by So I think it can also play that way. If anything, maybe some folks will discover Loge
Day through this film too, that would be nice. Tell me about some of the filmmakers that are coming out to the event as ever, it's really important to us to have filmmakers present. We're a scrappy, a little festival, but really whatever resources we can raise for it goes towards bringing filmmakers because I feel like there's no better effect, there's no better cause for celebration than to have filmmakers together showing their film, talking to the audiences, but they're
also talking to each other. We have three of the daytimes of the five day festival dedicated to the works in progress, and we bring in filmmakers to show their new films. We also have filmmakers who are coming to show these completed films to participate in those sessions. So a density of filmmakers is really important to us. For Opening Night, We've got bon George Fristees film a premiere to Toronto and it's imminently going to come out through
US distribution. But director Durgatchubos is going to be there as well as the star of that film, Lily McInerney. She's extraordinary in that film and is one future star, so excited to have her. The filmmakers, so filmmakers that we've mentioned already are going to be in town. So
Yoko yamanaka Desert Namibia is going to be there. Iva Radovosovic, Serbian filmmaker who made a film called When the Phone Rang based on her own experience of the sort of fracturing of Yugoslavia and memory piece, a fiction piece, but basically a memory piece of her own experiences. She'll be joining us. We have filmmakers from Bulgaria for the filmmaker of Windless joining us from Moldova, Romania in Rado Chiornichuk film Tata, the documentary, the film that you mentioned. Filmmakers
joining us from Lebanon. I would say most of the films in our lineup, if you go through it, we will have a filmmaker present, including on the last day when we'll have Sophia Bodonovitch's in town with measures for a funeral, and our closing night film, The Chenov the young Italian filmmaker Giovanni proto Ricci. That film premiered I believe, also in Venice last year and is also has an imminent release in the US, but where I'm able to
sling it for closing night and have the filmmaker present. Yes, So having folks around is just crucial to what we do. That's part of what we want to offer the audiences and we want to offer the filmmakers themselves. There are some film festivals, if you've been to them, or if you're curious about them, that are much more about the industry. You're there to walk the red carpet, release your movie, do a lot of interviews, but you don't necessarily in
that environment get to see other movies. You constantly run into filmmakers who are talking to me and others and saying, tell me what you saw. I don't get a chance to see these How is that other film I heard so much. First of tends to be a festival where the filmmakers catch up on those things because you're encouraged to spend those days with us watching movies. So you know, you can discover films. You can also discover filmmakers because filmmakers are engaging in the same activity.
That's wonderful. So tell me some of the brass tacks. As far as I know, it's March twelfth through the sixteenth, taking place.
At the Easy Movie Image. All of that happens there. Yeah, we have two cinemas there. It all happens within that space. There's never more than two things going on at the same time. But things are staggered such that you can take in as much as you would like to over the course of the day. Yeah, everything plays once, so you do have to make some choices. We try to put very different types of films against each other so
that you're not making too tough a choice. But like I said, the first three days of those five days, the twelve, thirteen, fourteenth, we have these works in progress sessions and then in the evening of those nights turn it over to regular screens, and then the full days of Saturday and Sunday we've got so there's twenty features total, and there's one program extended program of experimental short films that Edo and our friend and colleague David Schwartz put together,
as well as one program of student shorts from Jonathan B. Murray Center for Documentary Journalism at the University of Missouri. We always work with them on bringing their award winning shorts filmmakers, So just twenty two programs on the coast for five days. We also try to make it for some For folks who live in Astoria, Long Island City, Queens, you know, this is a gift that you can walk
there and spend every day there. For those who are traveling from some farther distance, either in the city or beyond, we do design it so that when you come, you'll have an opportunity to see multiple films rather than just a single film to make it worth your while. And ideally also there'll be a little mini story within the festival on each of those afternoons or evenings if you come, So there's a design to that as well.
And I imagine that passes are your best bargain.
That's definitely a rest bargain. Absolutely. There's a full festival pass. There's also day passes for Saturday Sunday, which are the fuller days. If you want to come just for one of those days, you can get a really reasonable pass. I think basically for the price of two films, you could see upwards of five or six.
So it looks like it always having some technical difficulties. We won't hear him on this wrap up, but Eric, tell me a little bit more about what's going on with you, what do you have looking forward to?
So, yeah, this is for all I know, the west First Look I'll be doing for a while because I have just taken out a position as a director of Film Creation and Programming at the Jacob Burns Film Center in Clavetonville, New York, which is about forty five minutes from Willmey and in Westchester, very well renowned art house cinema that does both first run as well as repertory programming. So excited about doing that. We'll be kind of full
steam ahead there come April. Feeling moved, heavy, conflicted, bittersweet about First Look, a festival that have been very passionate about for the ten years I've been at the museum and feeling like we were leaving in good shape and hoping that there's a great next chapter, both for the programming at MOMI as well as First Look. I should note, since i'll speak on behalf of Itto, that he's he also moved on. He went to the Metrograph in downtown New York to be one of their full time programmers,
which is a great opportunity for him as well. But we're both fully on for First Look. We did the entire program with our colleagues at the museum, Sarah Luciano and our Paneda Sonya Epstein all participated in putting together this version of First Look, and we'll all be back together for one big bonanza for next week. But yes, stay tuned for plans for next year and beyond. I can't wait to come back and be a part of it.
From a different perspective, well, I'll tell you, I get those Metrograph emails all the time of what's playing there and out here in Detroit. I am super jealous. I'm also super jealous of all the people that get to go to the First Look festival because it looks amazing
as well. And yeah, the films that I've seen from it have been terrific, and I really am very jealous of people that get to go and experience that, Like you were saying live theaters back, we are in person and to experience all of this with an audience is just I was such a treat.
Agreed, and Mike, I'm so grateful and glad of your interest in first look in your interest in these films. To me, it's not about our being territorial and being the ones to find these films and show these films. Nothing would make me happier than if these films have more of a life because folks notice what's happening in New York and are interested in the coverage that comes out of it, that they ask their own venues to show these films, or of other programmers attention and show
them elsewhere. They're all absolutely worth more engagements in the future.
Hopefully it will come to you and beyond. Fingers crossed, Eric, thank you so much for your time. Please give Ada my best. It's always great talking with you guys, and I hope we can talk again in the future. Maybe there's going to be some opportunity if you're in your new role, so all this exciting stuff.
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