With the fall festival season in full swing, countless films are at the beginning of an uncertain life cycle, searching for a distributor to reach a wider audience. But a greater number of films never even make it that far. Zia Anger’s first film, “Always All Ways, Anne Marie,” was produced in 2010 and became one of thousands of feature films that found themselves stuck after being roundly rejected at every festival they were submitted to.

It’s a dead end that many filmmakers face, but it’s hard not to take it personally. Now more than a decade older, Anger has parlayed that anticlimax into her first (distributed) feature, “My First Film,” a fictionalized retelling of the chaotic production of “Always All Ways” and a convoluted, “Hearts of Darkness”-esque reflection on forging artistic redemption in catastrophic circumstances. The strange logic of finding a way back into feature filmmaking by rethinking her past failures isn’t lost on Anger — but it’s the path that presented itself.

“Once I knew I had this story, I thought, ‘Oh, this is what it feels like to have something that can actually be made.’ I just decided to follow that,” Anger says over Zoom.

That self-imposed homecoming has been happening for years now. After directing music videos for artists like Mitski and Beach House in the 2010s, Anger created a live performance piece, also titled “My First Film,” that revisited the same turbulent period in her life that’s imagined here. In it, Anger would perform on her laptop, showing various windows and AirDropping selected files to the audience. This live rearrangement of footage from the unreleased film, personal photos, and typed narration attracted producers at the independent banner Memory, who came on board to tour “My First Film.”