MOMI’s 2025 First Look Festival celebrates adventurous cinema, with highlights including the documentaries Elementary (Claire Simon) and Tata, as well as the docufiction When the Phone Rang.
Discover other festival highlights here
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First Look, the Museum of the Moving Image’s annual showcase of “adventurous new cinema” runs this week from March 12–16. Past editions have played host to Seventh Row favourites from the festival circuit that didn’t necessarily get the buzz they deserved. The most well-known title in recent years is Cannes Jury Prize Winner The Eight Mountains, a contemplative Italian drama about friendship across decades and continents, which was our #2 film of 2023 and screened at the festival that year. Other past highlights you can see now include the striking Croatian debut feature and coming-of-ager Murina (2022’s opening night selection) and British-Palestinian filmmaker Saeed Taji Faourky’s creative nonfiction film A Thousand Fires (2022 edition).
MOMI’s First Look Festival often screens excellent titles that don’t have US distribution — many of which are still unavailable years later. This includes the Korean brief encounters drama Mimang (2024 edition) — a TIFF highlight — and French capitalism-is-killing-me dramedy Zero Fucks Given straight from Cannes (2022 edition). After a one-year stint on Mubi, the excellent Georgian drama Comets (2021 edition) is MIA, but you can see Iranian drama 180 Degree Rule (2021 edition) thanks to Highball TV.
This year’s edition: First Look 2025
This year’s edition is strong on Canadian content, including a new film from Seventh Row favourite Sofia Bohdanowicz (Measures of A Funeral) and Durga Chew-Bose’s debut feature Bonjour Tristesse, both of which premiered at TIFF last year. It’s also a strong lineup of women directors and creative nonfiction films. Established French documentarian Claire Simon’s latest film Elementary screens alongside first-time co-director Lina Vdovîi’s TIFF highlight Tata (her co-director previously made Seventh Row favourite Acasa, My Home).
Below are brief reviews of three of this year’s highlights.
Elementary (Claire Simon, France)
In her lovely documentary Elementary, Claire Simon turns her camera once again (after Le concours and Premières Solitudes) to a French institution of learning: an elementary school in a Parisian banlieue. Like her last institutional documentary, Our Body (2023), the film opens as we approach the school, and we won’t leave its walls again for the rest of the film. Over a school year, Simon observes the rhythms of the school day, where classes are punctuated with outdoor play and language skills are as important as life skills.
Keeping her camera at the height of the young students and close to them, Simon immediately helps us forge an empathic connection with the young people. The adults, by contrast, are giants whose top half often doesn’t fit into the frame. It’s a thoughtful conceit for a film as much about how children develop social relationships at school as it is about how they learn to multiply numbers or use a dictionary.
The film ends on a high as the children perform Rihanna’s “Diamonds” in a final school concert, which is sure to have filmgoers rushing to rewatch Céline Sciamma’s Girlhood, about the next stage in their educational journey.
When the Phone Rang (Iva Radivojević, Serbia/US)
On the border between personal nonfiction and autofiction, writer-director Iva Radivojević’s fragmented memory piece When the Phone Rang repeatedly returns to the phone call from 1992 that opens the film — the original site of trauma. When the eleven-year-old protagonist answers the ring, she discovers her grandmother has died, and hours later, her entire life will be upended as her family flees the country.
As the narrator tells us, the call happened in another time, when “this” was still a country. Now, it only exists in films and the memories of people born before 1995. She’s talking about Yugoslavia, though the film never makes that explicit. The film follows our young protagonist as she and her family repeatedly pack their suitcases and flee to safety. Their first stop is Sofia. But the future stops are hard to distinguish: for the girl at the centre, they’re defined by an apartment block like any other and maybe a school.
The texture of memories
Radivojević’s film is uncommonly sensitive to the texture of memories: the way you remember the sound of leaves, turning down the loud stereo to answer the phone, your father’s porn collection hidden under his bed, or the neighbour who sniffed glue — but little of the everyday minutiae that defines a life, like going to school or playing in the park. It’s built into the film’s grammar: we only know we’re in Sofia, for example, from the narrator, because the only part of the city we see is the apartment building where the protagonist lived for a while. Adults are rarely seen; it’s the protagonist’s siblings and young friends that define her world.
With each new chapter in the film, we return to the same image: an old clock striking 10:36 a.m. at the time of that fateful call and the sound of the phone ringing. It’s the sound of the end of innocence and the loss of home and identity. An image that gains meaning because we keep returning to it — it’s more vivid and specific by design than much of what follows because it’s also a knell. Although the film suffers a little from Radivojević’s intentional lack of specificity about her family’s flight from Yugoslavia in the hopes of telling a more universal story of migration, it does plunge us more directly into the child’s point of view.
Tata (Lina Vdovîi and Radu Ciorniciuc)
Here’s an excerpt from my TIFF 2024 review: “Tata starts as an intimate story of a possible reconnection between an estranged father and daughter, but quickly becomes a story of cycles of abuse, the society that condones it, and how we prevent ourselves from passing on intergenerational trauma to our children. Lina is pregnant with her first child, so part of her journey in the film to reconnect with her father and his past is about trying to deal with her demons before her daughter arrives. In this way, it recalls the excellent Canadian short Anotc ota ickwaparin akosiin at this year’s festival.”
