Working on It—First Look 2025

A centerpiece of First Look 2025, the Working on It program offers a lab-like environment for work-in-progress screenings, workshops, and discussions about the artistic process. This year’s edition will take place during the afternoons of March 12–14 and is open to the public. 

NOTE: Admission to Working on It is free for students. No reservation needed, just present a valid ID at the front desk.

Working on It is made possible by lead sponsorship from Lismore Road. 

Session 1: Wednesday, March 12, 2025 

12:30–4:30 p.m.: Reverse Shot Emerging Critics Workshop (PRIVATE) 

2:00–4:00 p.m.: Work-in-progress presentation and discussion: Filmmakers Steve Maing and Eric Metzgar present material from their project The Great Experiment, an ambitious cinematic time capsule of one of the most volatile and perplexing eras of American history and identity, a surprising and cinematic meditation on the intersection of our complex, ever-evolving individual and national narratives. (Bartos Screening Room) 

2:15–4:00 p.m.: Special Preview presentation: “Pete Docter and Frank Oz on the Art of Character Creation.” In this conversation recorded exclusively for MoMI at Pixar Studios in late 2024, Pete Docter, Chief Creative Officer of Pixar, talks to the legendary Frank Oz about his extraordinary approach to creating some of the most beloved characters of the past half-century, including Yoda, Cookie Monster, Miss Piggy, Bert, Grover, Fozzie Bear, and dozens of others. (Redstone Theater) 

4:30–5:30 p.m.: Work-in-progress presentation and discussion: Artist Max Bowens shares material from his project Male Fantasies, an embodied portrait of law, order, and masculinity in the American Midwest, combining police bodycam footage with hybrid testimonials from the present. (Bartos Screening Room) 

Followed by a reception sponsored by Lismore Road. 

Session 2: Thursday, March 13, 2025 

12:30–3:30 p.m.: Reverse Shot Emerging Critics Workshop (PRIVATE) 

12:30–1:15 p.m.: “We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Boat”: A conversation about the art (and process) of connecting films with their audiences between Senior Curator of Film Eric Hynes and Karol Piekarczyk, the artistic director of Millennium Docs Against Gravity. The biggest documentary film festival in Poland, MDAG is the only festival in Europe to take place simultaneously in seven cities throughout the same country. Karol also oversees Against Gravity, a key player in arthouse film distribution.  (Redstone Theater) 

1:00–2:30 p.m.: Work-in-progress presentation and discussion: Filmmaker Michael Coleman presents an edit under construction, along with sample scenes, from his debut feature documentary Satan’s Greatest Lies. What began as a document of George Haw Russell’s decades-long fight to preserve East Texas’ disappearing wilderness transforms into an intimate study of a man grappling with purpose, loss, and the weight of legacy. This screening presents the first half of the film alongside newly captured material, revealing how their growing trust exposes deeper emotional truths—both about George’s unraveling world and the filmmaker’s shifting role within it. (Bartos Screening Room) 

1:30–3:00 p.m.: Multimedia performance and discussion: Filmmaker Argyro Nicolaou presents Unsettled, a multimedia lecture performance and work-in-progress feature that explores the fast-changing landscapes of an island under occupation and the filmmaker’s attempts to reconstruct her mother’s past. (Redstone Theater) 

3:00–5:30 p.m.: Work-in-progress session: shorts from the Jonathan B. Murray Center for Documentary Journalism at the Missouri School of Journalism. Moderated by First Look Senior Programmer Edo Choi. (Bartos Screening Room) 

3:15–5:30 p.m.: Work-in-progress presentation and discussion: Amelia Evans presents a cut of her feature-length documentary Minor Attraction, an attempt to craft empathetic portraits of three people who acknowledge they have pedophilic desires but who claim never to have sexually interacted with a child—and who each want more support to keep it that way. What emerges is an intimate exploration into shame and loneliness, the limits of empathy, and the cost of our collective silence around desire, pleasure, and the body. (Redstone Theater) 

Followed by a reception sponsored by Lismore Road. 

Session 3: Friday, March 14, 2025 

12:30–1:15 p.m.: Work-in-progress presentation and discussion: Artist Diana Haro presents a cut of her project Portrait of Absence, an experimental documentary about growing up in Tijuana and reckoning with the death of her homeless father. Haro writes: “I became obsessed with trying to understand this by spending time on the streets and capturing the gestures I observed. The video is an exercise in borrowed memory, tracing the steps of where my dad used to live and juxtaposing these places with the areas in the city where I grew up. Both are linked through archival footage and my perspective as a girl seeing both through my mother’s home window.” (Redstone Theater) 

12:30–2:45 p.m.: Work-in-progress presentation and discussion: Director Alessandra Sanguinetti and producer Julia Solomonoff present a cut of their feature The Illusion of an Everlasting Summer, an intimate portrayal of the lives of two cousins growing up in rural Argentina, spanning decades. Sanguinetti’s lifelong collaboration with the girls captures their evolving relationship, dreams, fears, and struggles from childhood through adolescence, pregnancy to motherhood—one a farmer, the other a single mother and teacher.  (Bartos Screening Room) 

1:00–2:30 p.m.: Reverse Shot Emerging Critics Workshop (PRIVATE) 

1:30–2:15 p.m.: Work-in-progress presentation and discussion: Filmmaker Julia Mendoza Friedman presents material from her short film Fracaso es un río mío / Failure Is a River of Mine, in which an American filmmaker and a rural Guatemalan ex-midwife contend with the results of a failed documentary project about the failure to continue practicing midwifery, as well as the failure to communicate the obstetric and sexual violence that bind them both together, hoping to create a new essay film that actively dialogues with queer and feminist legacies of failure. (Redstone Theater) 

2:30–3:45 p.m.: Work-in-progress presentation, multimedia performance, and discussion: Filmmaker Robert Kolodny explores the possibilities of a future film built from hand-scanned 8mm reels captured by his grandparents, his own relationship with capturing motion picture on celluloid, and the mentors who taught him the craft. (Redstone Theater) 

2:45–3:45 p.m.: Work-in-progress presentation and discussion: Filmmaker G. Anthony Svatek presents an excerpt of his feature Humboldt USA. Nineteenth-century gay naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, the world’s most used namesake, serves as an instrument to explore the pursuits of everyday Americans reckoning with their disappearing environments: from helicoptering bighorn sheep across the Nevadan desert to battling against urban highways in Buffalo, New York, to hacking redwood forest ecology in northern California. (Bartos Screening Room) 

4:00–5:30 p.m.: Live presentation and discussion: First Look filmmaker Göran Hugo Olsson, in conversation with filmmaker David Osit (Predators, Mayor), shares a parallel film constructed out of one specific thematic element. Olsson writes: “During the six years we made Israel Palestine on Swedish Television 1958-1989, in parallel we collected and assembled all the maps of the region that aired during that period. Being asked in hundreds of interviews and Q&As what I think about the future, my reference point is oddly enough always this experimental film of the maps, made from our own visual research. I think this film in all its quirkiness in a way tells the story in a very haunting way, and strangely enough also in very mesmerizing way.” (Redstone Theater)  

4:00–5:30 p.m.: Work-in-progress presentation and discussion: Filmmakers Toma Peiu and Luiza Parvu share material from How Come We Ended Up Here?, a 16mm poetic journey across New York City during times of pandemic, war, and urban transformation. The film is guided by the histories, recollections, and dreams of the post-Soviet Korean Central Asian diaspora. Following the rough-cut screening, filmmakers, protagonists, and audience members will discuss the film, focusing on the collaborative process and aesthetic choices. (Bartos Screening Room) 

Followed by a reception sponsored by Lismore Road.