There’s Never Been a Movie Like ‘My First Film’ — Director Zia Anger’s Metatextual Odyssey Back to Her Debut Feature’s Disastrous Production

variety.com:

J. Kim Murphy With the fall festival season in full swing, countless movies stand at the beginning of an uncertain lifecycle, seeking a distributor to reach a wider audience.

But a greater number of films don’t even get to that step. Produced in 2010, Zia Anger’s first film, “Always All Ways, Anne Marie,” became one of the thousands of features that find themselves without a path forward after being roundly rejected from every festival it was submitted to.

It’s a dead end that a lot of filmmakers face, but it’s a hard one not to take personally. Now more than a decade older, Anger has transformed that anticlimax into her first (distributed) film “My First Film,” a fictionalized retelling of the chaotic production of “Always All Ways” and an intricate, “Hearts of Darkness”-level reflection on forging for artistic redemption in catastrophic circumstances.

The strange logic of finding a way back to feature filmmaking through reconsidering her previous failures is not lost on Anger — but it’s the path that presented itself. “When I knew that I had this story, I was like, ‘Oh, this is what it feels like to have something that could actually be made.’ I just decided to follow that,” Anger says over Zoom.