The Museum of the Moving Image is pleased to announce the complete lineup for the 11th edition of First Look, the Museum's festival of new and innovative international cinema, which will take place in person March 16–20, 2022. The Festival introduces New York audiences to formally inventive works that seek to redefine the art form while engaging in a wide range of subjects and styles. The 2022 lineup includes both nonfiction and fiction, features and shorts, as well as forms that fall outside the boundaries of traditional theatrical distribution, from gallery presentations to live performances to artist talks. This year, the festival will premiere 38 works, including 18 features representing more than 30 countries. Artists will appear both in person and remotely.
“Now in its 11th year, First Look has evolved into an event reflective of both the current state of the cinematic arts and MoMI's curatorial character and curiosity,” said Eric Hynes, Curator of Film. “We're attracted to a wide spectrum of work, from a diversity of makers, and are ever in search of new ways of seeing and expressing. The films and projects in the festival are indeed new to New York, but First Look also signifies an open, activated way of approaching the moving image. Crucial to this is our showcasing both finished and unfinished work—the latter via our daytime Working on It sessions—offering artists and audiences an enticing space in which to encounter one another.”
Tickets & Passes are on sale from February 10: movingimage.us/series/first-look-2022/
This year's festival showcases the following Asian films:
OPENING NIGHT
The Night
New York premiere
Tsai Ming-liang. Taiwan, Hong Kong. 2021, 19 mins. No dialogue. DCP. Recorded in November 2019 at the height of mass protests against Hong Kong's Anti-Extradition Law, Tsai's plaintive durational portrait of emptying streets and an overpass on Causeway Bay builds almost imperceptibly to its exquisite pang of sorrowful longing.
SHOWCASE SCREENING
Petrov's Flu
United States premiere
Dir. Kirill Serebrennikov. Russia. 2021, 145 mins. In Russian with English subtitles. DCP. Russian cause celebré Kirill Serebrennikov's third feature is a hallucinatory, surrealistic adaptation of Alexey Salnikov's novel The Petrovs in and Around the Flu, in which a young husband, wife, and child feverishly careen through the day, the past, and the dreams and nightmares of a city on the edge. A Strand release.
SHOWCASE SCREENING
Mr. Landsbergis
New York premiere
Dir. Sergei Loznitsa. Lithuania/Netherlands/Ukraine. 2021, 246 mins. In Lithuanian and Russian with English subtitles. DCP. The latest documentary from the indefatigable Loznitsa is a masterwork of archival storytelling, grippingly and exhaustively detailing the Lithuanian fight for nationhood during the crucial years of 1989 -1991, threaded together by interviews with the first Head of the Lithuanian Parliament, the now 89-year-old Vytautas Landsbergis.
Babi Yar. Context
New York premiere
Dir. Sergei Loznitsa. Netherlands/Ukraine. 2021, 121 mins. In Russian and Ukrainian with English subtitles. DCP. Winner of jury prizes at both Cannes and IDFA, Loznitsa's latest film constructed entirely of archival footage (following The Event, The Trial, and State Funeral) is a meticulous recounting of the events at Babi Yar, a ravine on the outskirts of Kiev where, in 1941, one of the largest mass executions in history took place, and where citizens who turned on their Jewish neighbors under one occupation sought to erase their actions under the next.
Day after…
North American premiere
Dir. Kamar Ahmad Simon. Bangladesh/France/Norway. 2021, 115 mins. In Bengali with English subtitles. DCP. A century-old paddle steamer called the Rocket journeys from capital city Dhaka to coastal villages in a 360-degree portrait of contemporary Bangladesh, complete with a literal upstairs/downstairs class divide – politicians and radicals in conflict, workers, the elderly and bohemians gathered above and below deck.
A New Old Play
North American premiere
Dir. Qiu Jiongjiong. China. 2021, 179 mins. In Mandarin with English subtitles. DCP. The story of 20th-century China, from the collapse of the Qing dynasty through Mao's Cultural Revolution, is recalled through the irreverent remembrances of an old thespian on the road to the afterlife. In his hand-crafted masterwork, celebrated artist Qiu has delivered a gloriously synthetic historical pageant in homage to classical Chinese opera without forgetting to make us laugh. A dGenerate release.
Reflection
New York premiere
Dir. Valentyn Vasyanovych. Ukraine. 2021, 126 mins. In Ukrainian with English subtitles. DCP. Vasyanovych's follow up to his acclaimed Atlantis concerns the trials of a Ukrainian surgeon who, moved to join his fellows at the front of Russia's military incursion, is promptly captured, subjected to sickening horrors, and then released as though from an alien abduction. A grim and bloody tour de force of long-take cinema, Reflection obliterates the imaginary line between states of peace and states of war.
A Thousand Fires
North American premiere
Dir. Saeed Taji Farouky. France, Switzerland, Netherlands, Palestine, Myanmar. 2021, 90 mins. In Burmese with English subtitles. DCP. This ravishing film follows the tireless Thein Shwe and his family as they eke out a life drilling for oil in the fields of Magway, Myanmar. Tracing ineluctable cycles of life and death on multiple levels – natural, social, spiritual, and economic – A Thousand Fires accomplishes a rare feat, successfully balancing the universal and the particular without compromising the dignity of those with whom it was made.
Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash
East Coast premiere
Dir. Edwin. Indonesia. 2021, 114 mins. In Indonesian with English subtitles. DCP. Indonesian auteur Edwin's exhilarating whatsit blends grindhouse exploitation with meet-cute romance and magical realism in the form of a shaggy dog road movie. Ajo Kawir, a fighter whose fearlessness is matched only by shame over his enduring impotence, falls for (and gets pummeled by) a female fighter named Iteung, sending him on a journey in which he may finally rise to the occasion. A MoMI Disreputable Cinema presentation.
Persistent Visions Program 2
Persistent Visions is the Museum's ongoing series dedicated to experimental works. Gestural lyrics, offerings to the heavens, rituals for ancestors, meditations on unfulfilled dreams give way to new forms, radical structures for restoring luminous contact with life, which, in turn, prepare the way for primordial visions of the world and our first tremulous contact with it.
pài-la̍ k ē-poo (saturday afternoon)
New York premiere
Erica Sheu. Taiwan/USA. 2021, 2 mins. 16mm-to-digital.
Merapi
New York premiere
Malena Szlam. Indonesia, Canada. 2021, 8 mins.
FIRST LOOK IN THE MUSEUM GALLERIES
Our Ark
New York gallery premiere
Dirs. Deniz Tortum, Kathryn Hamilton. Netherlands, USA, Turkey. 2021, 12 mins. Single-channel loop. Exploring the technological advances that have made backing up our world possible – from trees to turtles to tangerines – Our Ark probes the urge to preserve as well as what cannot be
captured.
