First Features
The first time’s a charm for certain filmmakers, a fact attested to by the films gathered together in this collection of distinctive feature film debuts, the works of audacious young talents who came onto their sets with a lifetime of ideas about cinema stored up and ready to be put to the test. A selection of auspicious beginnings that not only show the promise of mature masterpieces to come, but are great films in their own right.
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2 Friends
Directed by Jane Campion | 76 mins | 1986
A formally daring inquest into a fractured friendship from Campion with a screenplay by novelist Helen Garner, 2 Friends opens with once-inseparable teenage girlfriends who having drifted apart, then moves back through the years to observe the episodes th... -
A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night
Directed by Ana Lily Amirpour | 104 mins | 2014
Amirpour’s atmospheric, entirely original, black-and-white thriller gave an infusion of fresh blood to the venerable vampire movie genre, revolving around the figure of a mysterious, chador-clad female bloodsucker who exercises a powerful pull on a ... -
Poison
Directed by Todd Haynes | 85 mins | 1991
With his first feature, Haynes took his influence from the patron saint of all queer outlaw art, the French writer and director Jean Genet. The result, a landmark of New Queer Cinema, was a trio of intercut, stylistically distinct stories drawn together by... -
Unrelated
Directed by Joanna Hogg | 100 mins | 2007
Anna (Kathryn Worth) arrives in Tuscany to visit her school friend Verena (Mary Roscoe), Verena’s cousin, and her new husband—but to the dismay of all, 45-year-old Anna seems more interested in spending time with the trio’s teenaged kids (including a youn... -
Variety
Directed by Bette Gordon | 100 mins | 1983
A young woman lands a job as a cashier at a downtown porno theater, and soon finds herself inexorably drawn towards what’s happening onscreen—as well as other troubling fantasies. One of the great independent films of the ’80s, featuring a who’s who of t... -
O Sangue
Directed by Pedro Costa | 95 mins | 1989
Shot when he was 29, Costa’s first feature is a story of two brothers forced to go on the lam after their father’s death. Shot in shimmering black and white, and developing an air of sumptuous fairy-tale enchantment, it stands alone in his oeuvre, worlds a... -
Sebastiane
Directed by Derek Jarman | 90 mins | 1976
Jarman’s feature debut—co-directed with Humfress—makes blatant the latent homoeroticism in artistic renderings of the biblical story of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, reveling in the male form while recounting a tale of repressed desire turned to sadism ...
