In addition to the 23 feature films being screened at the Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look 2025 Festival this week (March 12-16), a curated selection of recent short films will be presented, sometimes accompanying the features or in one of two short film showcases. Go here for tickets and more information.

Directed by Oscar–nominated filmmaker Bill Morrison (“Dawson City Frozen Time”), “The Vanguard Tapes” were filmed in the mid-1990’s when he worked as a dishwasher at the legendary New York jazz club the Village Vanguard. These clips from his HI-8 footage are an invaluable and entertaining record of jazz greats like Cecil Taylor, Lonnie Smith, Harold Mabern, Jamil Nasser, and others as they take breaks in the kitchen between sets to laugh about career foibles, gambling experiences, the low-esteem afforded by some to the soprano saxophone (“It’s for calling cobras!”) and even the plot of episodes of the soap opera “The Young and Restless.” Screens before “Zodiac Killer Project.” U.S. premiere.

Directed by Ewelina Rosinska, in collaboration with Nuno Barroso, “Unstable Rocks,” was filmed over a five-year period at a variety of Portugal locations. It’s a rapidly-edited collage of animals, rock forms and Portuguese workers. Live birds are contrasted with injured ones being healed by humans, and then dead ones. Sacred relics are carried out of churches to be cleaned. A huge flock of vultures descend onto some scraps. A man plays a bagpipe. (I thought only the Irish played them!) A lyrical, poetic appreciation of the variety and sanctity of nature. Screens before “Sanctuary Station.” North American premiere.

“Bliss Point“ is the final film in a trilogy directed by Gerard Ortín Castellví depicting the automation and consumption of mass-produced food. Brilliantly photographed and edited, it shows scientists conducting high-tech experiments to create the ideal distribution of often bio-engineered ingredients, factory workers picking grocery orders with the help of a massive grid of robotic devices, and products photographed against a white background for catalogs and online shopping. Though a damning indictment of the way so many of us eat now, it also an almost balletic performance of 21st century technology, a postmodern version of the “Industry on Parade” industrial films you’d see on TV in the 1950s. Also the only short in the festival with a credited “fox wrangler!” Screens before “The Periphery of the Base.” Director Gerard Ortín Castellví in person. North American premiere.

“Illuminations (Avant-Garde Shorts),” a showcase of experimental shorts, will screen on Sunday, March 16, 2025 at 1:00 p.m. With filmmakers Ben Balcom, Sarah Ballard, Sam Drake, James Edmonds, Eva Giolo, Claudrena N. Harold, and Maximilien Luc Proctor in person.

Ben Balcom’s “The Phalanx” employs footage of contemporary adults in the Ripon, Wisconsin building which was once the site of a mid-19th century agrarian commune called “The Wisconsin Phalanx” with voice overs of actual letters written by members of the short-lived community. World premiere.

“Being Blue” (Luke Fowler) is set in Prospect Cottage, Dungeness, the former home of the late UK filmmaker Derek Jarman and it collages gorgeous images of his intricate gardens, art, books stuffed with postcards and paper ephemera, color charts and interview extracts (including ones with Tilda Swinton and Jarman) to inspire questions about art-making, nature, sexuality and colors themselves. North American premiere.

With “How To Make Magic” Blanca García took her Super 8mm camera to the New Forest, “the largest remaining unenclosed common land in England” to film this brief, silent incantatory work fusing pages of a children’s book on magic from the 1970’s with shots of nature celebrating the spells created by specular meditation: the mosaics of tree branches, camera flare and a ouija-board. New York premiere.

James Edmonds’ “Songs Overheard In The Shadows” repeats the time-honored experimental film strategy of an asynchronous pairing of heavily filtered or superimposed images with mysterious sounds and dialogue fragments. Images of a woman in a baroque passageway are reprised throughout this haunting work. World premiere.

One of my favorites in the showcase, “A Thousand Waves Away” (directed by Helena Wittmann, known for her 2017 feature, “Drift”), edits shots of performers set in natural settings transfixed or running in fear accompanied by a tense electronic score by Nika Breithaupt (alias Nika Son, who has worked before with Wittmann) to create the kind of stylized, rhythmic nightmare Alain Robbe-Grillet characters may have suffered from. North American premiere.

“Suspicions About The Hidden Realities Of Air” is Sam Drake’s paranoid-inducing meditation of cold war radiological tests, including experiments on baby teeth! North American premiere.

Eva Giolo’s “Memory Is An Animal, It Barks With Many Mouths” is set in the valleys below the Dolomite Mountains, which are in northeastern Italy. We see Ladin children blissfully engaging with nature as voice overs tell mythic stories of the region and discuss their Rhaeto-Romanic language. And the mystery of holes, including the entrances of caves, is explored. A ravishing and poetic celebration of a place, language and people many of us have never known about. North American premiere.

Sarah Ballard’s “Full Out” begins with documentary images of the famous 19th-century work of neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot’s, who had female patients at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris perform symptoms of their purported hysteria. Charcot was a huge influence on Freud but critics later claimed that the women performed because of his “suggestions.” In other words, they picked up on what they had to do to keep being diagnosed as hysterics. Ballard then asserts that a recent phenomenon of cheerleaders fainting may be related. A quick Google check suggests other factors (exhaustion, dehydration) but there may still be a performative connection. World premiere.

“Chelsea Drive” (Kevin Jerome Everson & Claudrena N. Harold) is only four minutes long, accompanied by a great throwback soul number by Brandon Lane, and you may find yourself wondering what year the footage of black students at the University of Virginia dancing and having fun at a party was shot because it actually represents three decades of those students! North American premiere.

“Aotearoa” is the Maori name for New Zealand and Maximilien Luc Proctor’s brief film (shot with double-perforated film stock) includes footage of the beach in Matapōuri (of that country’s North Island), a snowy landscape in Germany’s Lake Weissensee region and a house in the greater Auckland region. And despite the varied locations, it was edited in camera! North American premiere.

For the eighth year in a row, First Look is presenting “First Sight,”  a jury-awarded selection of student film shorts from the Jonathan B. Murray Center for Documentary Journalism at the Missouri School of Journalism. Introduced by filmmaker Robert Greene.

I’ve seen two of the films. Michael Coleman’s “Satan’s Greatest Lies” is an entertaining portrait of George Russell, a 78-year-old East Texas environmentalist who has spent his life buying land to protect it from clear-cutting and development. A thorn in the side of local Huntsville politicians and businessmen, he is also a colorful eccentric who wrote and acted in a 2008 cult horror film, “Long Pig,” featuring bloody scenes shot in a “torture room” he built in his family’s former atomic bomb shelter, an unorthodox Christian and the founder of the first “green cemetery” in Texas. The suspicious death of his daughter four years ago has greatly affected his health and he fears his fight to save thousands of acres of trees and wildlife may soon die along with him. A powerful story of an American original. Watch the trailer:

In “Victim,” writer/director Tessa Jagger-Wells tells the story of a 1950 rape and murder cold case involving a woman (Janett Christman) who lived above a diner near the house she has moved to in Columbia, Missouri. (To attend school at the Documentary school there, I assume.) She describes how the crime, which happened when the 13-year-old victim was babysitting, may have inspired the cult crime film “When a Stranger Calls” (starring Carol Kane) and other slasher films. (The Fred Walton film, based on an earlier short film by him, appears to be based on a Santa Monica, California case, yet the Christman case is credited with being a forerunner to the “babysitter terrorized by a man upstairs” urban legend which informs these films.) Only one woman, a friend of Janett’s, agrees to talk to Jagger-Wells but this would be a great subject for a full-length doc.