First Look Fest Starts this week

The Museum Of The Moving Image’s annual First Look Fest starts this week and we are better for it.

The festival is New Yorkers first chance to get a look at films that made waves and won awards at other festivals across the globe before they get a regular run in theaters. The festival is a way of seeing a lot of films you may have heard of, or films you should have heard of before they become the talk of everyone in the film community.

This year the big film is SUJO, the award winner from Sundance that many people in my circle were talking up. While the other films on the slate don’t have that high level of visibility they are all films that have rightly gotten noticed.

I have been covering the festival for number of years now and I love that it points me toward a large number of films that delight me. Yes many films are ones that I missed elsewhere, but more often than not they are films that were not on my radar, so I had no idea that they existed.  Several films this year are like that, such as FOOTSTEPS, which is a trippy film about Amsterdam made up of hundred plus year old film. The film is a blast and a trip into another time and place.

I will have a lot of reviews coming in the next few days and it would behoove you to look at the slate and just buy tickets to anything that interests you. I say this because there is so much good stuff you almost certainly can’t go wrong.

While I will have reviews running starting tomorrow, I do want to suggest a couple of titles:

FOOTSTEPS- as I said above it's a trippy film about Amsterdam

ACHILLES is a killer look at two people dealing with the crushing nature of Iranian rule and their attempt to escape.

FEATHERWEIGHT is documentary like historical drama about featherweight boxer Willie Pep on the eve of his return to the ring.

and the opener SUJO which is a deeply moving film about a young man trying not to father's footsteps into life in the cartels.

And with that I leave you to go to the website and buy some tickets. I have more films to watch and review so check back through the festival for more suggestions.