FIRST LOOK 2024 - MIMANG
Presented by Museum of the Moving Image
Sunday, Mar 17, 2024 at 12:30 pm
Redstone Theater | Museum of the Moving Image
(36-01 35th Ave, Astoria, NY 11106, USA)
Part of First Look 2024
Tickets: $15 / $11 senior and students
With director Kim Taeyang in person
Dir. Kim Taeyang. South Korea. 2023, 92 mins. DCP. In Korean with English subtitles. With Lee Myungha, Ha Seongguk, Park Bongjun, Baek Seungjin, Jung Suji. A young man (Ha) and woman (Lee), both unnamed, meet by chance in the historic Jongno district at the heart of Seoul. Former acquaintances, they walk for a while, exchanging musings on their former and present trajectories. He has just begun his studies at art school. She is a film scholar who lectures at the Seoul Cinema, an iconic movie theater that closed in 2021. In two succeeding chapters, divided by unspecified temporal leaps, we will revisit these characters as they in turn revisit Jongno’s landmarks, haunts, and byways, but much about them and the city will have changed beyond recognition. The contingent and unexpected transformations that people and places undergo over time is the theme of Kim Taeyang’s richly cryptic debut feature, which engenders a bittersweet sense of loss and hope. Filmed over four years in a walk-and-talk style that immaculately balances figure and landscape, Mimang invites comparison to the longitudinal strategies of Linklater and Apted, as well as the talky cinema of Rohmer and Hong Sang-soo, but hones a playfully plaintive poetry all its own. New York premiere
Preceded by:
The Perfect Square
Dir. Gernot Wieland. Germany/Belgium. 2024, 8 mins. DCP. In Wieland’s elliptical film, a multi-year attempt to train birds to fly in geometric formations dissolves into a more philosophical reflection on the discrepancy between concept and reality and the desire for control and conformity embedded in Western society. North American premiere
About First Look 2024
Presented by Museum of the Moving Image
Wednesday, Mar 13 - Sunday, 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.
To purchase tickets, please visit: https://movingimage.org/series/firstlook2024/