Today, my guest is Zia Anger, who for my money is one of the most gifted and adventurous emerging filmmakers working today.
I first met Zia at a film festival back in 2015 and was struck by how confident and self-possessed she was, an artist who knew exactly who she was and what she wanted to do.
I was also struck by how she folded her life into her work, such as in her first short Thanks for Calling, Baby, which features a phone call with one of her two dads (she also has two moms) where he shares an update on his HIV status.
A year or so after, I remember us talking on the phone about the feature she wanted to make, which she was struggling to get off the ground, an autobiographical film addressing the failure of her unreleased debut movie.
That project actually initially found form in 2018 as a hugely innovative live show, My First Film, which became something of a sensation. In it, Anger shared her laptop screen for a movie theater full of people, guiding them through the story of her troubled cinematic past, with the help of emails, video files, notes app narration and more.
Post-pandemic, Anger finally got to make My First Film as a feature. Innately personal and formally adventurous, it breaks boundaries and bridges genres, and achieves a moment of genuine transcendence that attempting to describe would only cheapen.
The film’s release in 2024 coincided with the arrival of Zia’s baby with her longtime partner, fellow filmmaker Theo Anthony. Zia wrote a beautiful piece about filmmaking and motherhood for Talkhouse called The Process, which is one of my favorite personal essays from the past few years. (Side note: Zia and Theo actually met at that same film festival where I first met her, and they clicked one fateful night doing karaoke in a dive bar.)
When I was thinking about who I wanted to talk to for this season, Zia was one of the first people who came to mind, just because she is so smart and unabashedly herself, and our conversations are always surprising and really interesting.
As you’ll hear, I was in the process of losing my voice when we spoke, but my croakiness did not prevent us getting to a bunch of compelling topics, as Zia and I talked about: The problems of being ahead of your time, how Justin Bieber’s recent Coachella show followed in her footsteps, the remarkable series of “Take It to the Limit” parties she attended as a college student, the dreams she has that Jung would have a field day with, what she would do during a nuclear holocaust … and much, much more!
I started off our conversation by asking about a picture I could half-see in the background …
My First Film is available to stream on MUBI, and you can find a bunch of Zia’s other work online also.
This episode was produced by Myron Kaplan and the theme music is by The Range.
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Next week on Nobody’s Ever Asked Me That, my guest will be indie pioneer and the genius behind Sidewalk Stories, Charles Lane ...
Featured image of Zia Anger by Christian DeFonte.
