MoMI First Look 2025: Thoughtful Experiments and Meta-Commentaries

Last year was the first time I was introduced to the Museum of the Moving Image’s “First Look” program and I was so surprised by the selection of films and especially Lois Patiño‘s  Samsara, which became my favorite film of 2024 and topped all of my year-end lists, that I couldn’t wait to cover the program again this year. The value of something like MoMIs “First Look” is that it decidedly focuses on experimental, documentary, and international cinema. This gives the programming a much-needed freshness away from the more generic programming that goes on in fests near the beginning of the year. This year again there are some very stark and bold works like Peripheries on the Edge, a film by filmmaker I’m growing to admire each passing year in Charlie Shackleton and Sofia Bohdanowicz, and some new names (to me) in So-Yo Hen and Deniz Eroglu. Overal a good mix of films, some I admired in theory, others I was pleasantly surprised by.

Measures for a Funeral (Sofia Bohdanowicz)

Sofia Bohdanowicz, a Toronto filmmaker who grew in prominence along with several other independent filmmakers including Sophy Romvari and Isaiah Medina, and whose films I’d describe as formally rigid but philosophically explorative, returns with a strangely concocted tense and decidedly academic drama Measures for a Funeral. The blaring betawaves that rise and fall throughout the movie create a haunting sense of foreshadowing but they always seem to be a little out of place in the context of what surrounds the main character Audrey Benac (Deragh Cambell), a graduate student who is researching the life of violinist Kathleen Parlow, who has a distinct connection with Audrey’s grandfather. Bohdanowicz puts us inside Audrey’s head without making us fully a part of what she’s experiencing and Deragh Cambell delivers a scintillatingly frustrating performance. Throughout the movie she portrays Audrey perfectly as residing in self-alienation and every time she rejoins the world she reveals more and more the relationship to her mother in uncomfortably direct ways. We sense that her fascination teetering on near-obsession with Parlow is because of the contrasting relationship they have to pursuit of dreams and expectation. Audrey begins to alienate her best friend and also seems to have a very conceited way of talking to everyone – in stilted, rehearsed monologues that feel like she’s reciting them from a textbook but in the first person. The choice to make her central character essentially turn her feelings into open pontification gives mixed results. It creates a constant off-kilter feel to the whole movie that is certainly original, if a bit eager to impress.

Zodiac Killer Project (Charlie Shackelton)

Zodiac Killer Project is framed from the standpoint of writer-director Charlie Shackleton relaying how he almost-but-not-quite had gotten a dynamite true crime documentary about the Zodiac Killer off the ground. Shackleton who not only shares a first name with Charlie Kaufmann, but also a propensity for tying his stories into interesting meta-fictional knots, pulls an Adaptation in taking the failure of one project by creating another project about that particular failure and letting it branch out in many different directions. This film is handsomely staged and shot, with each camera-movement mimicking the suspenseful camera pans of many a horror or suspense film to reveal locations that Shackleton had planned to make his true crime documentary. Shackleton’s voice is also perfect for this kind of movie – soft and malleable in its ability to undercut rising suspense with a slight chuckle and droll delivery of anticlimax. It’s a gift and a curse in a way. Shackleton’s style can’t help but just be a little too afraid of being mistaken for passionate. While he clearly has a distinct language as a filmmaker and this Zodiac Killer Project is certainly fun to sit through, especially for the eager MFA student or film writer (guilty as charged), it is essentially a self-aware think-piece – limiting in its inability to dig any deeper into its expansive subject – in this case, the untamed proliferation of murder and crime on streaming channels as a source of giddy entertainment – than its ironic symbols and visual tawdriness.

Taman Taman (SO Yo-Hen)

The standout feature of what I saw at MoMI was SO Yo-Hen’s quiet and sweet Taman Taman, another meta-film like Shackleton’s but stripped of its connection to the greater media spheres. Here, two Indonesian poets meet in Tianen Park in Taiwan and recite poetry and tell stories about their observations in life to each other. The film is the only one shot in 4K with a high frame rate and the starkly crystal picture here relays an unmistakable modernity and presence in the current moment. It’s a bit of a tonic. A hangout movie that washes away the preconceived notions of cinema and art as a purveyor of pure style and form that loses both in the way current technology sterilizes the deific image of the past. Our two unnamed characters sit on various park benches, on the lawn, under multiple lamps through the night and we listen to just how they consider the role of immigrant – Indonesian in Taiwan – through history of movement, labor, and building of community. Less hypnotic and penetrating than Louis Malle‘s My Dinner with Andre but close to the dialectical games and fable-like atmosphere of Satyajit Ray’s Days and Nights in the Forest. But this movie isn’t all just sincere romanticism and socio-politics, there is a naturalness to the 4^th wall breaking that adds a metatextual element to the movie. We sense that this film is, in its innate depiction of the ‘here and now’ both in location, time, and style, a part of the proceedings itself. The camera is a part of the set, in the park, actively recording discourse and stories, and from time to time acknowledged as an extension, of the communication of the people being filmed, out to some audience in the future.

The Shipwrecked Triptych (Deniz Eroglu)

Three shorts in one, each radically different in style and filmmaking technique and each uniquely memorable. Deniz Eroglu is a new name I had not heard before this program but he is instantly a name I will look out for after viewing the sly and unnerving anthology film The Shipwrecked Triptych. The thesis of this film is that each story explores an aspect of the feeling of being shipwrecked. They all have vaguely nautical symbolism in them, but all of them to me, come across as stories about deception and escape. The first one, ‘Mutiny’, sees a group of workers in a nursing home have a bit of fun on New Year’s Eve after sending their elderly residents to bed early. The second, ‘Boarding’ is a dark and surreal home-invasion film about a German ‘government inspector’ who comes to an African immigrant family’s home and refuses to leave. The final story, ‘Drifting’, a medieval era outcast goes into the forest looking for some kind of meaning to existence. Eroglu films these in a bleak and gritty manner and there’s hardly a line drawn between the comedy and terror of each tale. They all feature characters whose smiles feel menacing, whose movements feel disingenuous and they all end in a manner that flips their dynamics on their head. It’s a challenging work that frustrates but I can bet it will grow in fondness for me with time.

Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look 2025 Took Place From March 12-16, 2025.