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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.

 

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Past Films in Series

A boxer leans on the ropes in a boxing ring and talks to three men standing on the floor below looking up at him.

The Featherweight

Showcase Screening
A young woman bearing her midriff stands on a garbage can and grasping a New York city street sign, with one arm out

Tendaberry

Showcase Screening
A group of teenagers walk down a vast American heartland landscape dotted with windmills

Gasoline Rainbow

Closing Night
A young shirtless man sits at a window smoking a cigarette, with a haze on the image

An Evening Song (for three voices)
A degraded color video image of two men, one holding an semiautomatic rifle, covering half his face, the other from behind wearing an army helmet

Limitation
Two men sit in a porch against a bucolic, meditative atmosphere; one reads an open book to the other

Samsara
A woman sticks her head out the passenger side of a parked car, kissing a man standing next to the car in a passionate embrace

Arthur&Diana
A man and woman stand in a cityscape, he behind her as she looks offscreen, both facing camera

Mimang
A group of people sit in a cafe in an Asian country looking up at a TV offscreen with serious expressions

The Clinic
A boxer leans on the ropes in a boxing ring and talks to three men standing on the floor below looking up at him.

The Featherweight

Showcase Screening
Eight human-sized figures seen from a distance standing against a vast blue sky horizon at twilight with some stars just coming out

Knit’s Island
A truck full of soldiers drives away, while men dressed in fatigues wave from the back of the truck as four other men say goodbye to them by splashing bottled water at them.

1489
A black and white archival photo of military generals in uniform, one wearing white, the others darker uniforms, all wearing hats; the image is spotted with water damage and wear and tear.

Behind Closed Doors
Seen from behind, a man and woman sit on a hillside looking over a parched, dusty middle-eastern landscape

Achilles
Four images in a quad setup: two women against yellow grass (top left), a tree with fallen boughs touching the ground (top right), a young black man with long hair standing against a white house (bottom right), a glass pouring water into another (bottom left)

Illuminations Program: Elsewhere/Here 
A group of children stand in a shallow reservoir of water in a parched landscape

What Did You Dream Last Night, Parajanov?
A middle aged woman with short spiky red hair stands amidst a group of people sitting in an auditorium...they all look forward, she looks to her left.

Flying Lessons
A diptych image of two women in close-up with long hair standing outside looking at camera

Sloan Screenplay Readings
A young woman bearing her midriff stands on a garbage can and grasping a New York city street sign, with one arm out

Tendaberry

Showcase Screening
A little girl stands with her arms crossed against a vast green landscape

Self-Portrait: 47 KM 2020
A man in a space suit seen from a distance walks across a rocky terrain enshrouded in fog

Solaris Mon Amour
A color-tinted turn of the twentieth century image of people in period clothes standing on a dock over a lake and looking at a windmill

Fiona Tan: Footsteps—Artist Reception
Two people sit in chairs sitting at the front of a small theater with a microphones

Working on It (Day Three)
A vast building nestled deep in a mountainous environment, seen from a distance

Magic Mountain
A young woman in a purple hooded coat leads a horse across a grassy terrain

The Echo (El Eco)

Showcase Screening
A man naked from the waist up bathes himself outside in front of a city apartment complex at night

Hazel (dual) + Gwetto
A woman holds a baby in a dark room near a window with daylight pouring in

First Sight: 2024 Award-Winning Shorts from the Jonathan B. Murray Center for Documentary Journalism
A large movie theater with an image of a woman projected on the screen and a person at a podium on the stage next to the screen

Working on It (Day Two)
A teenage boy in a hooded white sweatshirt stands in a forest surrounded by bare tree branches, looking off camera concerned

Sujo

Opening Night
A man in a suit stands with a mic talking to a small theater of people

Working on It (Day One)