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“At what point is a film finished? Is it when the filmmaker declares it to be done, or is it when its audience starts to see it? If it’s the latter, then Zia Anger ’s debut feature film, Always All Ways, Anne Marie (2012), doesn’t exist. Seeing as the work was accepted by none of the many festivals it was submitted to, no paying public ever saw it. Yet, the film is undeniably extant, and is now being lent a new life through an alternate presentation as part of a performance lecture that the artist has been delivering—titled My First Film , given most recently at Sheffield Doc/Fest —that interrogates all that which goes into the making of a film, as well as the various systems and structures that this act of creation is beholden to, and the mechanisms and measures that come to define its success.”