Museum of the Moving Image Announces FIRST LOOK FESTIVAL 2023 Lineup

Museum of the Moving Image has announced the complete lineup for the 12th edition of First Look, the Museum's festival of new and innovative international cinema, which will take place March 15-19, 2023.

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 2023 lineup includes both nonfiction and fiction, features and shorts, as well as forms that fall outside the boundaries of traditional theatrical distribution. This year, the festival will premiere 38 works, including 19 features representing more than 22 countries.

Among the highlights of the 2023 edition are Tori and Lokita, the newest from Belgian masters Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne and recipient of a Special 75th Anniversary Award at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival, as well as numerous debut films and early career works. Of the five showcase screenings-Babak Jalali's Fremont, the Opening Night selection; Lola Quivoron's Rodeo; Chloe Abrahams's The Taste of Mango; Artemis Shaw and Prashanth Kamalakanthan's New Strains, winner of a Special Jury Award in the IFFR 2023 Tiger Competition; and C.J. "Fiery" Obasi's Mami Wata, winner of the Sundance 2023 World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award for Cinematography, which closes the festival-only Jalali has directed more than two features. Several features received world premieres earlier this year at the Sundance and Rotterdam festivals, and some will debut at the upcoming True/False festival; others entered the world in 2022 through Berlin, Visions du Réel, Cannes, Locarno, Venice, IDFA, and beyond. First Look will be the first time any of them have played for an audience in New York.

First Look also features exciting new works from established filmmakers, including the U.S. premiere of Koji Fukada's Love Life; the New York premiere of Felix van Groeningen and Charlotte Vandermeersch's 2022 Cannes Jury Prize recipient The Eight Mountains; the North American premiere of avant-garde master Robert Beavers's The Sparrow Dream, presented as part of an all-16mm program with five previous shorts; as well as Rose Lowder's La source de la loire, screening as part of a special First Look edition of MoMI's recurring experimental showcase Persistent Visions; Maid, a new short from Lucrecia Martel; Mary Helena Clark and Mike Gibisser's A Common Sequence; and Gastón Solnicki's A Little Love Package.

An unprecedented four films will be presented under the banner of Science on Screen, MoMI's year-round series that showcases science or technology-themed works. All of these films-Terra Jean Long's Feet in Water, Head on Fire; Mary Helena Clark and Mike Gibisser's A Common Sequence; Gerard Ortín Castellví's Agrilogistics; and Leandro Listorti's Herbaria- speak to the precarious state of the world, showing plants seeking stable ground, while human agents of the Anthropocene are displaced.

Several other festival films speak to the current moment, including films centered on Ukraine (Three Women, Away), resisting colonization (The River Is Not a Border, Mami Wata, R 21 aka Restoring Solidarity), the global refugee crisis (Tori and Lokita, Fremont), and women's and LGBTQ+ issues (The Taste of Mango, Silent Love, Joan d'Arc, It's What Each Person Needs).

Filmmakers appearing in person will be announced later, along with the lineup for this year's fourth annual Working on It program, daytime sessions March 15-17 open to the public in which filmmakers, critics, and students engage in conversations about the creative process via workshops and work-in-progress presentations. This year, First Look launches the Reverse Shot Emerging Critics Workshop, with an inaugural cohort of six early-career writers. This year also begins a collaboration with Polish documentary festival Millennium Docs Against Gravity, with Artistic Director Karol Piekarczyk presenting two selections from their Warsaw showcase and engaging in the Working on It sessions. As in previous years, student work from both the Jonathan B. Murray Center for Documentary Journalism at the Missouri School of Journalism and the BFA Film Department, School of Visual Arts will be presented both officially in the festival program and as works in progress.