My First Film is now showing exclusively on Mubi. For more on Anger's film, go behind the scenes with an exclusive featurette. My First Film.Between 2010 and 2012, Zia Anger directed a feature film titled Always All Ways, Anne Marie in her hometown of Ithaca, New York. She cast her friend Deana LeBlanc as a surrogate for herself, and her actual father as the father. The semi-fantastical, semi-autobiographical film had a beleaguered production—rife with Adderall, an unwanted pregnancy, near-fatal accidents, and imploding friendships. It was never screened or distributed, but Anger has long bore its scars. Anger’s work has always been sharply self-critical and self-reflexive, and you can see commentary on the industry-perceived “failure” of making Always All Ways seep into her subsequent films, such as her polemical 2015 short My Last Film, which envisions a career-suicide note delivered via the film festival submission website Withoutabox. In 2018, frustrated by...