First Look 2024
Mar 13 — Mar 17, 2024
First Look, MoMI’s annual festival showcasing adventurous new cinema, returns for its 13th edition, offering a diverse slate of major New York premieres, work-in-progress screenings and sessions, gallery installations, and fresh perspectives on the art and process of filmmaking. This year’s festival introduces New York audiences to more than three dozen works from around the world, encompassing feature and short films; fiction and nonfiction; performances and experiments. The guiding ethos of First Look is openness, curiosity, discovery, aiming to expose audiences to new art, artists to new audiences, and everyone to different methods, perspectives, interrogations, and encounters. For five consecutive days the festival takes over MoMI’s two theaters, as well as other rooms and galleries throughout the Museum—with in-person appearances and dialogue integral to the experience. Each night concludes with one of five selected Showcase Screenings in MoMI’s Sumner Redstone Theater.
Filmmakers appearing in person will be announced later, along with the lineup for this year’s fifth annual Working on It program—daytime sessions open to the public in which filmmakers, critics, and students engage in conversations about the creative process via workshops and work-in-progress presentations. First Look again partners with Polish documentary festival Millennium Docs Against Gravity, welcoming Artistic Director Karol Piekarczyk and two filmmakers from their Warsaw showcase; student work from the Jonathan B. Murray Center for Documentary Journalism at the Missouri School of Journalism; and for the third year, staged readings of science-themed screenplays that are being developed by MoMI in partnership with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
Tickets for each screening program are $15 (discounted for seniors, students, and youth / free for MoMI members at the Senior & Student levels and above); with the exception of Opening and Closing Night, which are $20 ($15 members). Go to individual program pages below to purchase tickets.
An All-Festival Pass (incl. Opening and Closing nights, and Working on It) is $120. A Weekend pass for Saturday and Sunday access is $60.