With an emphasis on adventurousness, the 14th annual First Look program is back with more than 40 films over five consecutive days.
This year’s schedule mixes features and shorts, fiction and nonfiction, premieres, works-in-progress, and experiments with form from Wednesday, March 12, to Sunday, March 16.
And as always, the goal is to introduce audiences to new films, filmmakers to new audiences, and everyone to different methods, perspectives, interrogations, and encounters.
Click here for the schedule or read the following.
Opening Night: March 12
Bonjour Tristesse, 7 pm, U.S. Premiere
Dir. Durga Chew-Bose. 2024, 110 min. Canada/France. Durga Chew-Bose’s modern adaptation of Françoise Sagan’s classic 1954 novel features Lily McInerny as 18-year-old Cécile, spending her summer holiday on the French Riviera with her widowed father Raymond (Claes Bang). The carefree, sun-soaked days are interrupted by the arrival of steely fashion designer Anne (Chloë Sevigny). A major new film director, Chew-Bose has created a heart-wrenching, keenly observed coming-of-age tale.
March 13
Park, 6 pm, N.Y. Premiere
Dir. So Yo-Hen. 2024, 101 min. Taiwan. In this intricately improvised whatsit, Indonesian immigrants Asri and Hasan convene every day at twilight hour, in the heart of Taiwan’s oldest city, to share the day’s news and experiences, spinning second-hand tales of migrant struggle into rhapsodically spontaneous verse.
Showcase Screening: Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958–1989 6:30 pm, U.S. Premiere
Dir. Göran Hugo Olsson. 2024, 200 mins. Sweden/Finland. Working from thousands of hours of footage catalogued in the vaults of Sweden’s national television service SVT, archival chronicler Olsson unspools a rigorously cool and steely account of the Israeli Palestinian conflict, as witnessed and represented by Swedish journalists over the course of the Cold War era.
Desert of Namibia, 8:15 pm, N.Y. Premiere
Dir. Yôko Yamanaka. 2024, 137 min. Japan. Yamanaka’s second feature follows mercurial 21-year-old Kana, who vacillates among suitors, priorities, and moods. Does she want security or stimulation, adulthood or regression; is she just unpredictable or unwell? Yuumi Kawai embodies Kana with a fierce volatility that evokes the hot-blooded, without-a-net cinema of Cassavetes and Rowlands.
March 14
The Fifth Shot of La Jetée + Common Pear, 6 pm, U.S. Premiere
Dir. Dominique Cabrera. 2024, 104 min. France. Filmmaker Cabrera belatedly discovers in her latest feature that Chris Marker’s 1962 sci-fi photomontage La Jetée, made the same year that Algeria gained independence from French colonial rule, might also be an inadvertent historical document of her own family. This detective story uncovers evidence about her family, French colonialism, Marker, and film itself.
Common Pear, North American Premiere
Dir. Gregor Bozic. 2025, 15 mins. Slovenia. In a not-too-distant future ravaged by climate disasters, a team of scientists develops new technology that transmits true emotions from humans on screens to those that watch them.
First Sight: 2025 Award-Winning Shorts from the Jonathan B. Murray Center for Documentary Journalism, 6:15 pm
Cowboy Strike
Dir. Matt Pehl. 2024, 22 mins. U.S. In 1883, cowboys in the Texas Panhandle responded to the rise of the first mega-ranches in dramatic fashion: they launched a strike. In investigating the story of this long-forgotten historical anecdote, a songwriter seeks to pay tribute to the cowboys’ search for economic justice. Winner, Stacy Woelfel Award for Innovative Journalism.
I Will Take the Blame
Dir. Elena Fu. 2024, 15 mins. U.S. A young Chinese woman endeavors to mend her parents’ fractured marriage, only to encounter the painful realization of her own limitations. Winner, Best Film.
Satan’s Greatest Lies
Dir. Michael Coleman. 2024, 35 mins. U.S. George Russell, a maverick environmental activist with a God complex, mourns the unexpected loss of his youngest daughter, causing him to question his lifelong crusade to preserve the piney woods of East Texas. Winner, Best Director.
Victim
Dir. Tess Jagger-Wells. 2024, 13 mins. U.S. In 1950, Janett Christman was murdered while babysitting in Columbia, Missouri. Almost 75 years later, a filmmaker investigates the unsolved case and its surprising connection to pop culture while she confronts her obsession with true crime. Winner, Special Jury Award for Editing.
Showcase Screening: When the Phone Rang, 8:30 pm, U.S. Premiere
Dir. Iva Radivojević. 2024, 75 mins. Serbia/U.S. On a Friday morning in 1992, eleven-year-old Lana (Ilincic) receives a phone call about a death in the family, a life-changing event in sync with the fracturing of Yugoslavian history and identity. Inspired by her own childhood memories, filmmaker Radivojevic loops back to that fateful moment as a conjuring and incantation.
Sanctuary Station + Unstable Rocks 8:30 pm, N.Y. Premiere
Dir. Brigid McCaffrey. 2024, 69 mins. U.S. Shot on high-contrast black-and-white 16mm film and Super 16, this incandescent work weaves a rough, hallucinatory patchwork of encounters with women, old and young, solitary and collective, who live or work among the wildlife of the redwood forests and remote terrains of northwestern California. Part of Science on Screen.
Unstable Rocks, North American Premiere
Dir. Ewelina Rosinska, in collaboration with Nuno Barroso. 2024, 25 min. Germany/Portugal. Geology, animals, and the human path flow together in this subjective portrait of Portuguese landscapes.
March 15
The Periphery of the Base + Bliss Point, 1 pm, North American Premiere
Dir. Zhou Tao. 2024, 54 mins. China. Mixed media artist Zhou constructs mutating digital landscapes that confound classical notions of scale, composition, and visual realism. His latest sets us adrift in the desolate expanse of the Gobi Desert, where an amorphous infrastructure project of massive proportions is underway.
Bliss Point, North American Premiere
Dir. Gerard Ortín Castellví. 2023, 26 mins. Italy/U.K./Spain. Artificial intelligence manages a warehouse, identical rows of burgers are flipped, and robots glide through factories. Filmed with elegance and technological precision, Bliss Point portrays the automation of food production.
Windless, 12:30 pm, N.Y. Premiere
Dir. Pavel G. Vesnakov. Bulgaria/Italy. 93 mins. After years working abroad in Spain, a taciturn young man returns to his village in rural Bulgaria to clean out his late father’s flat. As he reconnects with old friends and relatives, he hears tales of his father, by all accounts, a fiercely deeply loving man whom he does not recognize from his own memories. 2024 European Film Awards Selection.
The Shipwrecked Triptych, 2:30 pm, North American Premiere
Dir. Deniz Eroglu. 2025, 90 mins. Germany. Displaying remarkable formal sophistication with a dazzling composite of film stocks, formats, and digital VFX, visual artist Eroglu’s provocative narrative triad forms a surreal, at times comic, and alway fascinating treatise on contemporary Germany, its meaning, its history, and its libidinal unconscious.
Tata, 3:30 pm, U.S. Premiere
Dirs. Lina Vdovîi, Radu Ciorniciuc. 2024, 82 min. Moldova/Romania. Moldovan journalist Lina receives a video message from her estranged father, a migrant worker in Italy, seeking help from his abusive employer. Equipping him with a hidden camera, Lina finds herself on a parallel journey of justice—uncovering a pattern of domestic violence that has plagued her family for generations.
A Frown Gone Mad, 6:15 pm, North American Premiere
Dir. Omar Mismar. 2024, 71 mins. Lebanon. In a beauty salon in Beirut, one client after another sits in Bouba’s chair seeking cosmetic treatment. Omar Mismar’s uniquely mesmerizing film consists entirely of close-ups fixed on clients’ faces. A work of real-life body horror that’s also a tender portrait of communal defiance.
100,000,000,000,000 (Cent Mille Milliards), 6:15 pm, U.S. Premiere
Dir. Virgil Vernier. 2024, 77 mins. France. Drifting through an ethereal Monaco during the eerie, emptied-out limbo of the Christmas holidays, a diffident young sex worker gradually forms a strange, tentative bond with a preadolescent whose parents, Chinese real estate developers, have left her in the charge of her Serbian babysitter.
Showcase Screening: Zodiac Killer Project + The Vanguard Tapes, 8 pm, N.Y. Premiere
Dir. Charlie Shackleton. 2024, 91 min. U.K. When his plans for a true crime documentary hit a wall, Shackleton set about reconstituting what might have been, while deconstructing what we’ve come to expect from an oversaturated genre—using Bay Area landscapes, archival material, reenactments, film and TV clips, and his own wry and nimble voice-over.
The Vanguard Tapes, U.S. Premiere
Dir. Bill Morrison. 2025, 29 mins. U.S. In 1995, Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Bill Morrison (Incident) was a dishwasher at the Village Vanguard, the legendary jazz club in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Morrison’s poignant and deliciously candid film, with footage captured during his breaks, features conversations with and monologues by legends Cecil Taylor, Lou Donaldson, Dr. Lonnie Smith, Harold Mabern, Jamil Nasser, and others.
Songs of Slow Burning Earth, 8:30 pm, East Coast Premiere
Dir. Olha Zhurba. 2024, 95 mins. Ukraine/France/Sweden/Denmark. Filmed over two years in Ukraine, Zhurba’s epic depiction of her society under siege by Russia moves ineluctably from one grandly scaled, finely detailed scene of calamity to another, each designated by its degree of proximity to the front.
March 16
Illuminations (Avant-Garde Shorts) at 1 pm
With filmmakers Ben Balcom, Sarah Ballard, Sam Drake, James Edmonds, Eva Giolo, Claudrena N. Harold, and Maximilien Luc Proctor in person
Part One: Working the Garden
Songs Overheard in the Shadows, World Premiere
Dir. James Edmonds. 2025, 22 mins. Germany. 16mm. Balanced on the edge of what is visible, everything comes from nothingness and returns to nothingness.
Aotearoa, North American Premiere
Dir. Maximilien Luc Proctor. 2024, 6 mins. Germany. 16mm. The snow of Weissensee, a home in Tāmaki Makaurau, the beach in Matapōuri. Edited in camera, using double-perforated film.
The Phalanx, World Premiere
Dir. Ben Balcom. 2025, 13 mins. U.S. DCP. Letters from the Ceresco community trace the fragility of harmony, the dream of life in association. Members of the phalanx drift apart, lingering in private corners, suspended in speculative time.
Chelsea Drive, North American Premiere
Dirs. Kevin Jerome Everson, Claudrena N. Harold. 2025, 4 mins. U.S. Digital projection. Chelsea Drive displays three decades of Black student style, fashion and dance at the University of Virginia.
Being Blue, North American Premiere
Dir. Luke Fowler. 2024, 18 mins. U.K. DCP. Filmed during a residency at Prospect Cottage, Dungeness, former home of artist, filmmaker and gay rights activist Derek Jarman, Being Blue touches impressionistically on themes of sexuality, queer British life, art making, and nature
Part Two: Finding the Forest
how to make magic, NY Premiere
Dir. Blanca Garcia. 2024, 5 mins. Spain/U.K. Super 8mm. Filmed in the New Forest, the largest remaining unenclosed common land in England, where the entanglement of non-human and human activity hides a joyous spell.
A Thousand Waves Away, North American Premiere
Dir. Helena Wittmann. 2025, 10 mins. Germany. DCP. The people are in turmoil. The ground from which their enchanted garden grows, is trembling.
Suspicions About the Hidden Realities of the Air, North American Premiere
Dir. Sam Drake. 2025, 9 mins. U.S. DCP. Fragmented records reveal a concealed history of Cold War-era human radiation experiments—a miasma of elite deviance. Desert dust settles into teeth. A search that dissolves into a cipher.
Memory Is an Animal, It Barks with Many Mouths, North American Premiere
Dir. Eva Giolo. 2025, 24 mins. DCP. Belgium/Italy. In the valleys surrounding the Dolomite Mountains, children reimagine ancient Ladin legends while they examine bodies of water, holes, caves, and passages looking for something lost or forgotten.
Full Out, World Premiere
Dir. Sarah Ballard. 2025, 14 mins. U.S. DCP. In French with English subtitles. In 19th-century Paris at the Salpêtrière Hospital, patients were hypnotized onstage to reproduce the symptoms of hysteria for public audiences. Over a century later, high school cheerleaders are fainting en masse.
Elementary, 1:15 pm, U.S. Premiere
Dir. Claire Simon. 2024, 105 min. France. The latest immersive work from documentary master Claire Simon takes us into Makarenko, a public elementary school in the Parisian suburb Ivry-sur-Seine, over the course of a school year, staying attentive to the glorious unpredictability of human interaction and the revelations of learning.
A Want in Her, 3:30 pm, N.Y. Premiere
Dir. Myrid Carten. 2024, 81 min. Ireland. When her troubled mother goes missing, Irish filmmaker Myrid Carten returns home to find her—at the risk of losing herself. Drawing upon previously captured footage, new interventions, and extraordinarily evocative visual experiments within their living spaces, Carten reinvents the “home movie” as an aching, active processing.
Measures for a Funeral, 4:15 pm, U.S. Premiere
Dir. Sofia Bohdanowicz. 2024, 142 min. Canada. PhD candidate Audrey (Deragh Campbell) journeys from Toronto to London to Oslo to research the life of forgotten Canadian violinist Kathleen Parlow while fever-dream calls from her dying mother (herself a failed violinist) go to voicemail. The latest from singular artist Bohdanowicz richly blends family history with archival research and gothic storytelling.
Chronicles of the Absurd, 5:30 pm, U.S. Premiere
Dir. Miguel Coyula. 2024, 77 mins. Cuba. Coyula and actor Lynn Cruz were subjected to various forms of control and intimidation while making their dystopian feature Corazón azul in Cuba in 2011. This defiant and entertaining work playfully uses headshots and avatars to visualize clandestine audio recordings documenting years of Kafkaesque impositions, threats, and vital dissident art.
Closing Night.
Diciannove, 7:30 pm, U.S. Premiere
Dir. Giovanni Tortorici. 2024, 108 mins. Italy. Outstanding newcomer Manfredi Marini plays Leonardo, who leaves his home in Palermo to attend business school in London, starting a journey that takes him to Siena and Torino, where he becomes increasingly intolerant of the larger world and others’ points of view. Tortorici’s debut is reminiscent of early Arnaud Desplechin as it zigzags temporally and tonally along with Leonardo’s impulsive, potentially toxic behavior.
Most screenings cost $17.50, but opening and closing nights are $25. An all-access pass is $130. Plus, passes for Saturday or Sunday are $35 each.
Museum of the Moving Image is at 36-01 35th Ave. in Astoria’s Kaufman Arts District.
Editor’s note: First Look was the New York launching point for new works by filmmakers such as Chantal Akerman, Bill and Turner Ross, Sergei Loznitsa, Claire Simon, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Ken Jacobs, James Benning, Iliana Sosa, Babak Jalali, Midi Z, Tatiana Huezo, Mohanad Yaqubi, and more.
Images: Courtesy of Museum of the Moving Image