#InTheLoop | The First Look 20/21 Festival Features Dozens of Film Programs
BY QEDC It's In Queens
No passport needed for this trip around the world.
The Museum of the Moving Image will present an extremely international First Look 20/21 from Thursday, July 22, to Sunday, Aug. 1.
The tenth annual expo will screen dozens of feature, mid-length, and short films from Belgium, Canada, Colombia, France, Georgia, Germany, India, Israel, Iran, Italy, Madagascar, Niger, Poland, Slovenia, South Africa, Sweden, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
More than half are directed by women.
Plus, MoMI will offer Working On It on two consecutive Fridays, July 23 and July 30. These live events invite audiences to discuss the artistic process.
There’s a kick-off in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery on Monday, July 19, at 7:45 pm. The 2009 documentary October Country will show with a live score by Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher.
Here’s the schedule for MoMI’s First Look 20/21 events.
July 22, 7 pm, New York premiere of The Grocer’s Son, the Mayor, the Village, and the World with Director Claire Simon by live video and Director Yaara Sumeruk in person.
In French with English subtitles, this 2020 Claire Simon documentary looks at France’s Lussas, where an uncommon business rises among the vineyards and orchards of cherry trees: an ultra-modern festival hub and platform to broadcast independent documentaries on the Internet. Preceded by Yaara Sumeruk’s short If We Say That We Are Friends.
July 23, 4 pm, US premiere of Ridge, 2019, 71 minutes, Polish and Swedish with English subtitles.
Director John Skoog’s debut involves encountering and collaborating with his childhood’s small Swedish community. Preceded by the NY premiere of The Harvesters, a six-minute Canadian look at each stage of a honey harvest by three Maasai men with hypnotic concentration.
July 23, 6 pm, US premiere of Stories from the Chestnut Woods, 2019, 81 minutes, Slovene and Italian with English subtitles.
Set in the forests along the Yugoslav-Italian border in the years after World War II, Director Gregor Božič’s film follows a stubborn old carpenter whose self-preoccupations blind him from his wife’s rapid descent into illness. He turns his attention to a woman who tends to her family’s chestnut groves after her husband’s departure.
July 23, 7:30 pm, Short Film Program, Mementos: Family Fragments of Film and In Performance.
In this evening of short films, live performances, a 3-D presentation, and audio incantations, artists follow divergent paths towards processing grief, trauma, witness, joy, and other family matters.
July 24, 1 pm, NY premiere of Il Mio Corpo, 2020, 81 minutes, Italian with English subtitles, Director Michele Pennetta.
In Sicily, Oscar collects scrap metal which his father resells to eke out a living for their family. Stanley, a Nigerian refugee, works a farm and other odd jobs, unclear if he’ll be paid and allowed to remain in the country. Preceded by the 22-minute Three Songs for Benazir by Elizabeth Mirzaei and Gulistan Mirzaei. In Pashto and Zari with English subtitles, this short depicts a camp outside Kabul, where Shaista struggles to support his family. His plan to join the Army are met with resistance from family and male elders, who are fearful of being used as pawns between the Taliban and the government.
July 24, 2 pm, Four Narrative Films from the BFA Film Department of New York’s School of Visual Arts.
Love stories, ghost tales, and fantasias that journey to Asia, South America, and the American suburbs.
July 24, 4 pm, North American premiere of Zinder, 2021, 82 minutes, Haoussa with English subtitles.
Kara Kara is a former leper colony within Zinder, one of Niger’s largest agricultural centers. Nowadays, ex-cons form body-building clubs called “Palais” there. Director Aïcha Macky returns to her hometown to get close to their everyday realities and inner lives.
July 24, 4:30 pm, 2020 Award-Winning Shorts from the Jonathan B. Murray Center for Documentary Journalism at the Missouri School of Journalism. All NY premieres.
July 24, 6:30 pm, world premiere of Cross Eyed with Director Amit Desai and cast in person, 2021, 100 minutes.
Artist-photographer Amit Desai works with precocious thespians — many educated at Frank Sinatra School of the Arts in Astoria’s Kaufman Arts District — to get rehearsal footage staged in public parks, studio interviews where the performers reflect on personal traumas, class experiences, artistic ideals, and the confluence of their normal adolescent anxiety with the abnormal anxiety of an authoritarian moment.
July 24, 7 pm, First Sight: 2021 Award-Winning Shorts from the Jonathan B. Murray Center for Documentary Journalism with an introduction by filmmaker Robert Greene. All NY premieres.
July 25, 1 pm, NY festival premiere of Nofinofy, 2019, 72 minutes, Malagasy with French and English subtitles, Director Michael Andrianaly.
After the municipality destroys his salon, Romeo must leave the high street of Madagascar’s Toamasina for a harder-to-find shack in a residential neighborhood. Loyal customers keep him going, but he still dreams of building a permanent salon.
July 25, 3 pm, US premiere of Comets, 2019, 71 minutes, Georgian with English subtitles, Director Tamar Shavgulidze.
More than three decades after leaving, Irina returns to the summer house of her youth in the outskirts of Georgia’s Tbilisi — and the person who has lingered heavily in her memory. Irina and Nana were once inseparable, sharing a bond beyond friendship that raised eyebrows in the small community. Since then, Nana remained, married, and raised two children, including a now-grown daughter. Back in the yard where they spent their teenage years, the air is dense.
July 25, 4 pm, North American premiere of Intimate Distances, which was filmed on Steinway Street in Astoria, 2020, 61 minutes.
The latest Phillip Warnell piece employs rooftop and ground-level surveillance techniques to track a voluble older woman as she encounters and engages strangers in surprisingly personal conversations.
July 25, 5:30 pm, US premier of Silent Voice, 2020, 52 minutes, Chechen, French, and Flemish with English subtitles, Director Reka Valerik.
A mixed martial arts fighter arrives in Brussels after fleeing Chechnya under threat from members of his own family amid state-sanctioned persecution of homosexuals. He struggles to find a way forward, fearful of being hunted down but eager to connect with those he might be able to trust.
July 25, 6:30 pm, US premiere of 180 Degree Rule, 2020, 83 minutes, Persian with English subtitles.
In this debut feature from writer-director Farnoosh Samadi, a school teacher plans to join her family at a wedding in northern Iran. When her husband is suddenly obliged to take an out-of-town work trip and forbids her to attend the wedding without him, she’s caught between impulses of independence and fealty, movement and stability.
July 30, 4 pm, US festival premiere of Transnistra, 2019, 96 minutes, Russian, Romanian, and Ukrainian with English subtitles.
Shot in the self-appointed nation of Transnistria—a narrow strip of land adjacent to Ukraine that is defined by its Soviet heritage—this Anna Eborn feature follows a group of 16-year-olds over a cycle of seasons, witnessing the end of their youth and their first attempts to forge futures within or beyond their small community.
July 30, 6:30 pm, US festival premiere of Bird Talk, 2019, 138 minutes, Polish with English subtitles.
Polish filmmaker Xawery Żuławski created this action film from an unrealized script by his father, the late master Andrzej Żuławski.
July 30, 7 pm, NY premiere of The Viewing Booth with Director Ra’anan Alexandrowicz in person, 2020, 73 minutes.
Director Alexandrowicz invites a series of viewers to watch and comment on videos portraying life in the occupied West Bank—some generated by Palestinian citizens, others by the Israeli government—before fixing on a young Jewish-American woman whose responses prove compelling, thoughtful, varied, and disconcerting.
July 31, 1 pm, North American premiere of Phases of Matter, 2020, 71 minutes, Turkish with English subtitles.
Director Deniz Tortum depicts Istanbul’s Cerrahpaşa Hospital, where he was born and his father has long worked as a doctor. Preceded by the 22-minute short When Two or Three (New York premiere), which is about the last two members of an Arizona church. They search for God in a scarred landscape as men extract copper from the mountains and throw dust in the sky nearby.
July 31, 1:30 pm, NY premiere of Bottled Songs 1-4, 2020, 77 minutes, English and French with English subtitles.
Essayists and directors Chloé Galibert-Laîné and Kevin B. Lee exchange arguments on ISIS propaganda videos—material that has haunted them for differing reasons.
July 31, 3 pm, NY premiere of Forensickness, 2020, 40 minutes.
Above-mentioned Galibert-Laîné’s second selection is an inquiry into contemporary forms of hermeneutics and rhetorics of authority from Reddit threads to cable news to Hollywood reenactments.
July 31, 4 pm, NY premiere of Maggie’s Farm, 2020, 84 minutes.
Director James Benning divides 24 three-and-a-half-minute shots sequentially into eight exteriors, eight interiors, and eight exteriors recorded in a single day. He studies the parking lot, stairwell, corridors, and loading dock of the CalArts building where he has worked for 33 years.
July 31, 4:45 pm, NYC premiere of There Will Be No More Night, 2020, 76 minutes.
Repurposing previously published infrared footage from American and French helicopter missions on the frontlines of the “global war on terror,” Eléonore Weber’s essay simulates and interrogates the conditions that govern real-life kill decisions and lays bare the video-game logic of an ethics that shields soldiers and masters from moral consequence.
July 31, 6:30 pm, Are We Here Together? Experimental Shorts exploring landscapes, cityscapes, bodies, sexuality, feminism, anti-capitalism, and anti-authoritarianism in search of meaning, connection, the self, resolve, and greater ideals.
The first program is approximately 60 minutes. The second one, Perceptual States, runs about 75 minutes with directors Peter Burr and Ross Meckfessel in person.
July 31, 7 pm, NY festival premiere of Searching Eva, 2019, 84 minutes, German, English, and Italian with English subtitles.
Director Pia Hellenthal introduces Italy-born Eva Collé, who is a writer, model, queer activist, sex worker, and social media personality.
Aug. 1, 1 pm, North American premiere of A Beautiful Summer, 2019, 81 minutes, French with English subtitles.
Director Pierre Creton mixes fiction and observation, while filming around his Normandy farmhouse. After washing up on the shore, two African migrants are invited into the home of Simon and Robert. Other people drift in and out of the story, including a pig and motorcycle repairman.
Aug. 1, 3 pm, the North American premiere of Don’t Touch Me, 2019, 80 minutes, French with English subtitles.
Director Christophe Bisson weaves together portraits of outsiders, fixating on hands and gestures to access silent pains and tactile persistence.
Aug. 1, 4 pm, Double Wow and Other Works by Ken Jacobs, who chats with MoMI’s David Schwartz.
This program includes two celluloid portraits of Jacobs’s young son and daughter and a digital exploration of 19-century stereographic imagery of children laboring in a thread factory.
Aug. 1, 5:30 pm, US premiere of A Rifle and a Bag, 2020, 89 minutes, Gondi, Madiya, and Hindi with English subtitles.
The Director NoCut Film Collective (Cristina Haneș, Isabella Rinaldi, Arya Rothe) follows a young family of ex-revolutionaries on the outskirts of the jungle in India’s Maharashtra.
Aug. 1, 7 pm, NY premiere of Cryptozoo with Director/Writer Dash Shaw in person, 90 minutes.
At the dawn of the 1970s, two hippies stumble across a gated community in the northern California forest. Inside are myriad cryptids—rare mythical creatures whose containment in this one-of-a-kind cryptozoo are suddenly threatened. Meanwhile, veterinarian and cryptid preservationist Lauren Grey travels the world in search of the legendary, dream-eating baku, encountering evil poachers and coming to question her role in the whole cryptid trafficking ecosystem. The Making of Cryptozoo: A Conversation with Dash Shaw will run at 6 pm.
Admission to the opening and closing night programs is $20, but tickets to all other events cost $15 with discounts for seniors, students, and youth (ages three to 17). There are all-access pass options.
All programs will take place in MoMI’s two main venues — the Sumner M. Redstone Theater and the Celeste and Armand Bartos Screening Room — with filmmakers appearing either in person or via live video.
“This year, we’re excited to add more films to the mix, creating a program that’s easily our biggest and most adventurous yet,” stated MoMI Curator of Film Eric Hynes. “In acknowledgment of our growing and supportive online audience—one of the few positive developments in an otherwise difficult year—a selection of films will be available via the MoMI website for viewing nationwide. However, our primary focus remains in-person screenings with a live local audience, an experience that remains irreplaceable and essential to what the festival is about.”
MoMI’s address is 36-01 35th Ave. in Astoria’s Kaufman Arts District.
Top image: Intimate Distances; bottom image: Sentient Art Film