First Look 2018

The seventh edition of First Look, the Museum’s acclaimed festival of innovative new international cinema, returns January 5 through 15. The Festival will include more than two dozen programs, featuring formally inventive new works that seek to redefine the art form while engaging in a wide range of subjects and styles. It opens with Toronto-based experimental filmmaker Blake Williams’s PROTOTYPE, a unique 3-D sci-fi–influenced film that immerses us in the aftermath of the devastating 1900 Galveston, Texas hurricane to fashion a haunting essay on technology, cinema, and the medium’s future. Like PROTOTYPE, many other films in First Look invent their own hybrid forms, exploding and combining genres. The full lineup features films from Brazil, Canada, Croatia, France, Georgia, Germany, Indonesia, Lebanon, Norway, Palestine, Poland, Portugal, Syria, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Organized by Chief Curator David Schwartz and Associate Film Curator Eric Hynes

Special thanks to Jean-Pierre Rehm, director of FIDMarseille, programming partner of First Look. For their assistance with First Look, the Museum also wishes to thank the Consulate General of Brazil in New York, French Cultural Services of the French Embassy, New York; UnionDocs (New York); the Polish Cultural Institute New York; and the Jonathan B. Murray Center for Documentary Journalism at the Missouri School of Journalism.