True/False Film Festival

'Tickled': Campaign Launched To Try To Discredit Provocative Competitive Tickling Documentary

Graham Winfrey — Mon, 23 May 2016 17:21:47 GMT

New Zealand journalist David Farrier's upcoming documentary "Tickled" doesn't hit theaters until June, but the co-director has already been hit with a lawsuit and a website devoted to discrediting the movie.

On top of the lawsuit and website, several journalists were also contacted about their coverage of the documentary from the Twitter account @kjclarkee, an unverified account that identifies itself as belonging to Kevin Clarke, a producer for Jane O'Brien Media.

The documentary that played at Sundance and the True/False Film Festival earlier this year focuses on the endurance tickling contests held by Jane O'Brien Media, which the film states is run by David D'Amato. The doc exposes some troubling practices at the company, which Farrier first got involved with after trying to write a story about the contests.

"Their first reply was 'we don't want to deal with a homosexual journalist,'" Farrier told IndieWire in a previous interview. "That comment is what kicked this whole thing off. They wrote that on their public Facebook page."

Even before making the documentary, Farrier discovered Jane O'Brien Media to be a particularly litigious company. After blogging about their interaction with Jane O'Brien Media, Farrier and his co-director Dylan Reeve received notices from attorneys alleging defamation. The involvement of lawyers indicated to Farrier and Reeve that there was a larger story worth pursuing, so they began work on their investigation.

Farrier is not worried about landing in hot legal water, however, as he sought the help of lawyers himself prior to making his documentary to ensure his movie would be protected against lawsuits. HBO and Magnolia are also on board to distribute the film, and haven't blinked, despite the lawsuit.

Farrier told IndieWire that anyone wondering who to believe in the spat between him and D'Amato should "see the film and make up their own minds."

Watch: Documentary Short 'Concerned Student 1950' Chronicles the Protests That Brought Down a University President

Chris O'Falt — Tue, 22 Mar 2016 17:49:37 GMT

Last fall, a group of 11 African American students at the University of Missouri linked arms and stopped University President Tim Wolfe’s car in the middle of the annual homecoming parade. They proceeded to quote statistics and share anecdotes of what it meant to be a black student on a campus where a number of racially charged events had happened in the last year. Wolfe ignored the students, as he had the concerns of African American students for most of his tenure, and failed to even get out of his car.

READ MORE: True/False: 'Concerned Student 1950' Premieres to Emotionally Charged Crowd, Including Spike Lee

Adam Dietrich, Varun Bajaj and Kellan Marvin – three undergraduate journalism students, all studying with an emphasis on documentary filmmaking – weren’t aware of the homecoming demonstration until the head programmer for the True/False Film Fest Chris Boeckmann visited their class and showed them video footage taken by the The Missourian, a local newspaper.

"Chris told us we could be doing work like this and that immediately put a spark in our mind and turned on our radar," recalled Dietrich.

Nothing stemmed from the homecoming incident for two weeks, until Monday, November 2, when graduate student Jonathan Butler went on a hunger strike demanding Wolfe’s resignation, and a group of students, calling themselves Concerned Student 1950 (1950 was the first year the University admitted an African American student), started camping out in middle of the school’s quad in protest.

"The following day, we'd seen a news article about it and Bill Ross [co-director of "Western" and "Contemporary Color," which will premiere at Tribeca Film Festival next month] was here guest lecturing," recalled Dietrich. "Our professor Stacey [Woelfel] pulled up the article and posed the question to Bill, 'How would you go about shooting a protest like this?' Bill said, 'I’d grab a camera, leave class right now and start shooting.'"

Ross’s reply sent another shock wave through Dietrich: "The only reason I stayed through the end of class is I idolize Bill, but immediately after that day Varun and I went down the campsite with a camera and started asking for access."

At first the student documentarians had a hard time gaining such access, as the student protesters had made a conscience choice to shut out all media and were equally suspicious of the student journalists. "I spent the next 24 hours reading and researching about the movement and looking for names I could try to contact to get permission to start filming, looking for any crack in the wall to get into this thing," explained Dietrich.

Eventually Dietrich found a friend of friend who knew Butler personally and was willing to vouch for him: "He emailed me back and said we could get full access to everything and start filming from the inside."

The students started filming the next morning. Over the next week, the story began to gain national media attention, especially when players from the Missouri football team lent support to the protesters, while Wolfe continued to stonewall and Butler refused to eat. It was around this time that Field of Vision co-founder AJ Schnack contacted filmmaker Robert Greene ("Kate Plays Christine"), who teaches at the University, looking to see if Greene would be interested in starting a film about the protests.

"When Robert told AJ he had students who had been filming the protests for a week AJ said, 'that's even better, I want to see what they are getting, let's see if we can get something out of this,'" recalled Dietrich.

"From there, [Field of Vision] became our production company, our distributor, a little bit of everything," said Bajaj, who told Indiewire that all three of the Field of Vision co-founders Schnack, Charlotte Cook and Oscar winner Laura Poitras ("Citizenfour") got creatively involved. "One of the biggest things they did for the film was hire our final editor Erin Casper, who was able to take everything to the next level."

"In a way they've become pseudo-professors," recalled Dietrich. "We were learning from every conversation we had with them and Erin. As we were making decisions, Erin was asking me questions I didn’t entirely understand because I had only been a filmmaker for six months really, so I’d have to ask her to take a step back and explain the larger technical aspect of her question."

The three students are well aware of how fortunate, and to a degree how bizarre it was, that their first attempt at filmmaking was being guided and supported by the leading documentarians in world. "I’m twenty years old and I’m getting notes from Laura Poitras," laughed Marvin, who was the student who took the lead on editing the film. "And what do you do if you get a note you disagree with? How do you tell one of your idols you disagree?"

Bajaj jokingly added, "Luckily, it’s a lot easier over email."

All three student filmmakers fully agree their final project is of professional quality they never could have achieved on their own and are completely in awe of what Casper was able to do in shaping their footage. The other remarkable part for the young filmmakers was how quickly they were able to turn the film around – "Concerned Student 1950" premiered at True/False at the beginning of March, only four months after the protests started.

"These issues didn’t end with the protests," explained Marvin. "This semester there's already been one other protest we've filmed. The University is already trying to shut down any more conversation and has released statements telling Concerned Student 1950 to stop making demands. It’s amazing and important to us that our film can be part of this conversation and help people understand what it means to be an African American student on this campus. That couldn’t have happened without the support we received."

Another unique aspect of the film stems from the students’ unique education. For the first two years they studied the "science" of journalism, but in the second part of their education they were introduced to the "art" of nonfiction by Greene, whose own work has focused on exploring the nature of performance in nonfiction filmmaking and embracing the use of cinematic language.

"Literally the first two months we spent with Robert flipped our understanding of being a documentarian on its head and introduced us to how you can have a relationship with your subject," said Bajaj. "Once a week he would bring up that Albert Maylses said, 'He's not a fly on the wall because a fly is unthinking and unfeeling.' We took that to heart and we learned we have a role in documenting real events."

All three students credit Greene’s teaching in shaping how they documented their fellow students. "We knew early we weren't doing scientific type news coverage. We were spending 20 hours a day with these students. I wanted to know them and feel a connection to them, learn something about them, and then to tell their story. I wanted people the have empathy and know their experience," stated Bajaj.

Dietrich agrees, "To go broader, my goal with the film specifically, was to go beyond the football team and the Wolfe’s resignation, which is what became the big news, and to get at the whole point of the movement – what it is like to be a black student on this campus – which is no longer part of the story and I hope that our film brings that back to the forefront of the conversation."

READ MORE: Sundance: How Robert Greene and Kate Lyn Sheil Made the Festival's Most Fascinating Documentary

You can watch "Concerned Student 1950" above. The release of this new short marks the beginning of Field of Vision's Season 2, which also includes titles like "Gatekeeper" and "Black Belt."

True/False Film Festival Review: Entertaining, Heartbreaking Documentary 'Peter And The Farm'

Noel Murray — Fri, 11 Mar 2016 21:28:56 GMT

To any passing outsider, Peter Dunning looks to be one hell of a farmer. In Tony Stone’s entertaining, heartbreaking documentary “Peter and the Farm,” the 68-year-old Dunning walks Stone and his small crew through some of what he has to do to keep his modest Vermont operation running; and his skill and dedication impresses. He bales hay, saws wood, slops hogs, herds sheep, slaughters and dresses his stock, and maintains his equipment, pretty much all by himself. He’s had wives and kids alongside him at various times during his decades of working the land, but they’ve all moved on. He keeps plugging away though, year after year, sensing what his property needs and doing what he can to provide.

It’s tough to describe the overall arc of “Peter and the Farm” though without making it sound unbearably depressing. Over the months that Stone spends following Dunning, he finds out that this scruffy loner isn’t Superman. Peter drinks too much, and he can be annoyingly bossy and judgmental. As he gets older and slower, his prickliness becomes a liability, because without loved ones around to support him, he can’t really keep up with all it takes to maintain a farm. There’s always another chore that needs doing, and it’s usually something he’s done so many times that it’s long-since lost its novelty.

READ MORE: The 20 Best Documentaries Of 2015

Eons ago, Dunning had a notion that he’d divide his time between growing things and making art, but now he rarely paints or writes poetry. Instead, he just tries to get through another day of futilely beating back the encroaching wilderness. When a veterinarian confirms that Peter’s milk-cow is pregnant, the old man laughs ruefully and says, “That just locks me into having to farm more.” When he talks about his own inevitable demise, Peter tells Stone that he doesn’t want his ashes scattered on his land, because he’s already left enough of his body — in chunks and drips — all around the property. It’s all very sad, this crushing dissatisfaction with the life Dunning chose for himself.

But it’s really not hard to watch — except maybe for those who are squeamish about some of the earthier aspects of Dunning’s job. (Beware: “Peter and the Farm” contains scenes of gutting, castrating, unborn-calf-repositioning, and the production of huge, fresh piles of cow shit.) Peter himself has lived a full and fascinating life, and he’s articulate and reflective enough to tell his own story with flair. The artist in him even takes over after a while, and he starts to steer the film, suggesting better shots than the ones that Stone and his other cameraperson, Nathan Corbin, are getting.

Not that there’s anything wrong with the way “Peter and the Farm” looks. Stone and Corbin are unusually attuned to the visual textures of rural life: the mist over the hills, the dust particulates floating in sunbeams, the dank of the basement where Dunning ferments enormous glass jugs of hard cider, and so on. Editor Maxwell Paparella helps underscore the pastoral loveliness via several impressionistic montages, where disconnected snippets of some of Dunning’s drunken late-night ramblings play over gorgeously composed, naturally lit shots of barns, ponds, and animals.

The whole movie does this really, contrasting the idyllic qualities of Peter’s farm with the restlessness of Peter himself. Though the structure is designed to follow more or less the turning of the seasons — hitting its darkest, bleakest stretch during the chill of winter — the interviews jump around in Dunning’s biography. He talks about the patches of land on the farm where he conceived his children, and the good times he had with the women in his life, long before he explains that they all abandoned him because of his drinking. He drops references to serving in the military and sending time prison, and the camera occasionally catches a glimpse of his gnarled hand, but Dunning doesn’t elaborate on any of this until later in the film. Stone and his crew get the audience hooked on the mystery of this charismatic crank, and then take their time before they answer some of the bigger questions.

In the interim? A lot of farming. Even if Dunning weren’t such a captivating subject, it’d be a joy just to watch him work. He got into this business in a rush of hippie idealism, and through a lot of trial and error he’s learned about grafting, seed-saving, animal husbandry, and warding off predators. He went “back to the land” presuming that if he respected nature, the Earth would provide. Instead, nothing’s come easy. If he doesn’t keep detailed notes on his sheep, he can’t keep them alive. If he doesn’t drink rum in the middle of the night, he gets the shakes. If he doesn’t tell his family he loves them, they leave.

“Peter and the Farm” is more of a character sketch than a story, and as such it’s not wholly satisfying. There always seems to be more to find out about Dunning, and the movie ends without any reassurances that Peter’s going to be okay. Viewers who come to care about him over the course of the film’s 90 minutes can only take comfort in something Dunning says about the cycles of nature. “Life announces itself in force,” he insists, adding, “Death slinks off.” So long as Peter Dunning’s still angrily confronting another day of impossible toil, he keeps pushing death away. [A-]

“Peter and the Farm” will next screen as part of MoMA’s New Directors/New Films program.

Daily Reads: Terrence Malick's Christian Connections, Why the Bonnie and Clyde Legend Lives on, and More

Vikram Murthi — Fri, 11 Mar 2016 16:59:04 GMT

Criticwire's Daily Reads brings today's essential news stories and critical pieces to you.

1. Terrence Malick and the Christian Story. Terrence Malick's new film "Knight of Cups" has had a fairly polarized reaction, a given considering Malick's style is so unique. Some have praised it as a truly necessary cinematic experience that only Malick can provide, and others have called it a pretentious, indulgent mess. For RogerEbert.com, David Roark examines Malick's films and their connection to Christianity.

Malick's films function as cinematic liturgies that paint a distinctly Christian picture of the good life — the kingdom of God — reflecting the gospel story of creation, fall, redemption and restoration. More so, Malick's works embody a unique lyrical, poetical form that, like music, does not only create emotion in viewers but also shapes viewers. In an essay on "To the Wonder," film critic Nick Olson underscores the formative nature of Malick's lyrical style: "[Malick] seems to me to be pressing for us to awaken our own inner depths of subjectivity and inhabit the outlines he's setting forth. He wants these grace notes to profoundly shape us — to impress upon us in the most personal way." On the one hand, there are a number of Christian ideas on the surface of Malick's work, whether it be the locusts in "Days of Heaven" that parallel the plagues of Egypt from the book of Exodus or the theological debate between Witt and Welsh in "The Thin Red Line." But the presence of such symbols and themes isn't necessarily the thing that distinguishes Malick's work. After all, there are a number of movies, books and stories that allude to the Bible — it's one of the most significant pieces of literature in history. On the other hand, when digging deeper beyond the surface, there lies a particular spirituality — a distinctly Christian spirituality — that supersedes these many elements. At the bottom of Malick's work, there is a prominent, consistent narrative and vision that drives it forward—that of the Christian story. This story is, first and foremost, what makes Malick’s films liturgical in a Christian sense. While all of his films fall in line with the Christian meta-narrative to some degree while boasting a yearning for Eden, Malick realizes this story mainly through the concept of nature and grace. "The Tree of Life," a film which not only epitomizes the ethos of Malick but also provides a microscope by which to see all his films, deals with this concept the most explicitly. In a voice-over at the beginning of the film, we hear Mrs. O'Brien (Jessica Chastain) explain two ways through life: "the way of grace" and "the way of nature." She states, "Grace doesn’t try to please itself. Accepts being slighted, forgotten, disliked. Accepts insults and injuries...Nature only wants to please itself. Get others to please it over them. To have its own way." Influenced by Christians thinkers like Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and actually lifted directly from Thomas à Kempis' "The Imitation of Christ," these words don't merely express a generic, universal morality about being good or being bad; they make up a distinct Christian doctrine about the nature of humankind and the grace of God through Jesus Christ. Malick affirms the Christian distinctiveness of the concept in a church scene: "Is there nothing which is deathless, nothing which does not pass away?" the preacher asks the congregation, and the camera pans on a stained glass portrait of Jesus Christ. The preacher goes on, "We cannot stay where we are. We must journey forward. We must find that which is greater than fortune or fate. Nothing can bring us peace but that."

2. Why We Keep the Legend of Bonnie and Clyde Alive. Kelly Reichardt's little-seen 1994 debut film "River of Grass" has recently received a new restoration. Originally premiering at Sundance but eventually forgotten until Reichardt made a new film in 2006, "River of Grass" follows two new lovers who go on the run after believing they have killed a man. In light of "River of Grass'" re-release, Christianity Today's Alissa Wilkinson examines the Bonnie and Clyde legend and why we still keep it alive.

There must be a reason we keep remaking the story of Bonnie and Clyde, right? The couple on a crime spree long ago passed from historical fact — early twentieth century American criminals who robbed and killed people during the Depression — and into myth. They loom so large they're now a narrative archetype, like Sisyphus, or Romeo and Juliet. The real Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow died on May 23, 1934, ambushed by law enforcement after four years on the run. Parker was 23; Barrow was 25. The historical details of their story take place during the "Public Enemy Era" (1931-1935), when criminals like John Dillinger and "Pretty Boy" Floyd captured the imaginations of Americans and became celebrities and, in some cases, folk heroes. Songs were sung. Legends were born. But the legend of Bonnie and Clyde transcends them all. Something about the story, the trope with the couple on a murderous, exhilarating run, has beckoned to a murderer’s row of filmmakers and storytellers, inviting them to put their own spin on it and re-read the story for their own time. Musicians have told and retold the story, too, from folk ballads and country songs to a line of songs from Tupac, Eminem, and Jay-Z. And like all good legends, the retellings interlock with one another. In 1967, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway starred in Arthur Penn's "Bonnie and Clyde," widely considered a watershed moment in American film history, significant and influential for its use of sex and violence. Its protagonists are seductive and exciting, anti-heroes to the last. Young people loved it and claimed it as a rallying cry for the counterculture, even as it seemed less than convinced that individuals can really exercise freedom against the constraints of society. Penn's protégé, Terrence Malick, turned to the trope for his first film, "Badlands," in 1973, which stars Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek. He was inspired by a different criminal pair: Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, whose two-month spree in 1957 and 1958 resulted in eleven bloody deaths in the midwest. But while the details of Starkweather and Fugate's spree are different, the arc remains the same: young lovers in the middle of the country on a bloody road trip that can only really have one ending. Where Penn's film is operatic and alluring, Malick's is stark and cruel. It was a sensation. In the credits, Malick thanks Penn. In 1974, Robert Altman took a crack at the archetype, casting Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall in a story based on Edward Anderson's novel by the same name. (Nicholas Ray made a film based on the novel as well, the 1949 "They Live By Night," which is often considered a forerunner to "Bonnie & Clyde.") In a typical Altman take, "Thieves Like Us" meanders across its Southern backdrop, lending a deep sense of lethargy and longing to the trope. "'Bonnie and Clyde' were anti-heroes, but this gang of Altman's has no heroism at all," Roger Ebert wrote in his review. "Just a kind of plodding simplicity, punctuated by some of them with violence, and by the boy with a kind of wondering love."

3. "Cloverfield" and the Long Lost Art of the Cinematic Tease. In 2008, director Matt Reeves and producer J.J. Abrams released a found-footage disaster film called "Cloverfield" after months of an interactive, involving marketing campaign; eight years later, and a spiritual sequel enters theaters with little to no marketing and Internet awareness. Abrams approaches his films as building a mystery box, something shrouded in secrecy only to be shown when the lights go down. In light of the release of "10 Cloverfield Lane," Telegraph's Robbie Collin argues that in the age of the Internet, film's last great surprise is the cinematic tease.

Many of the "10 Cloverfield Lane" tricks are standard practice at Abrams’ production company, Bad Robot – which is located in a Santa Monica warehouse identified only as The National Typewriter Company. Dark red scripts were used during the making of "Star Trek Into Darkness" and "The Force Awakens," and prompted Anthony Daniels, AKA C-3PO, to compare Abrams' operation to the Kremlin. Abrams hand-picked "10 Cloverfield Lane's" 34-year-old first-time director, Dan Trachtenberg, in part because of his work on the advertising campaign for Guillermo del Toro's "Hellboy II: The Golden Army," for which he made a series of spoof orientation cine-reels for a classified troll-suppression initiative called Panatrog. The videos popped up online three months before the film's release, and enticed fans into the unique world of the film without revealing a single frame of it. (Panatrog isn't even mentioned in "Hellboy II's" script.) Speaking on the phone from New York, Trachtenberg rued the current craze for "teasers for trailers for trailers" and tell-all campaigns, and reminisced about a very different kind of advert he saw in the cinema in the summer of 1993. In it, a miner chipped away at a tunnel wall before removing a grapefruit-sized rock, which was then split open to reveal a glassy golden substance with a mosquito entombed inside. It was the first trailer for "Jurassic Park," with zero footage from the film: just the specially shot mining scene and a voiceover that promised for the first time, man and dinosaur would share the earth. "It told me so little, and I had to know more," says Trachtenberg, who was 12 years old when Spielberg's film was released. When he finally saw it, he remembers being "so much more excited" than if he'd "known every bit of detail and every special effect before going in." Did he feel Abrams' teaser tactics piled on extra pressure to deliver on what was, after all, a low-budget first feature? He demurs. "The pressure works both ways," he says. "If you go with a heavy-duty campaign, it fuels an expectation that the film has to be better than all the parts you’ve seen so far." When it comes to recent studio campaigns, those parts can amount to a lot – sometimes more than the studios themselves realise. During Sony's 2012 promotional blitzkrieg for "The Amazing Spider-Man," Louis Plamondon, a Canadian HR manager and film enthusiast, was able to cut together a 25-minute version of the movie, including every major character development, action sequence, and even its ending, entirely from material released in clips and trailers. The day he posted the video, Sony released seven more behind-the-scenes featurettes that would have allowed him to add another 15 minutes of footage to his trailer-made reconstruction. Fittingly, Plamondon even released a trailer for it. "If you think you've seen it all," ran the tagline, "that's because you actually did." Insane as this seems, on blockbusters, it's more or less routine. "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice's" "secret" antagonist, the Kryptonian hell-beast Doomsday, was unveiled in a trailer back in December, along with Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman. Shortly after last week's premiere of the first trailer for the all-women Ghostbusters reboot, a making-of video was released taking us behind the scenes of scenes we hadn't even seen yet. When marketing "Prometheus," Fox built up to the release of the first trailer with three (!) 30-second teasers, released on four consecutive days almost six months before the film itself.

4. How the Success of "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" Makes a Misunderstood Sondheim Masterpiece Relevant Again. The CW show "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" has garnered much acclaim from the critical community for its musical numbers and its trenchant explorations of mental illness and the darker sides of otherwise bubbly characters. Flavorwire's Juan Barquin explores how the success of "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" makes Stephen Sondheim's misunderstood "Passion" relevant again.

When I watched the Zoetic Stage production of "Passion" in Miami last month, the show proved to be as abrasive as ever — characters are depicted as rash and manipulative, and the show is less about love than the outlandish idea of it — but the audience sat in rapt silence until the closing applause. It was a pleasant surprise that no one accused Fosca of being "crazy" during or after the performance. This inspired a question: Why do audiences of the past and audiences of the present receive this tragic woman differently? “'Unhappiness can be seductive.' / 'You pitied me.' / 'How quickly pity leads to love.'" These words, sung between the two lovers Giorgio and Clara at the opening of the show, seem innocuous at first, but neatly state the theme of the story that ensues. Fosca, Giorgio, and Clara are all flawed individuals, each revealing their thoughts and feelings to the others with a forwardness many might find off-putting. They speak of disgust, of pity, of beauty, of love, of all things that reveal the folly of mankind, and often act foolishly in the heat of the moment. As Sondheim says, this strikes audiences as ridiculous. Witnessing "Passion" in 2016, one work of art kept popping into my head: The CW's "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend." The Golden Globe-winning musical comedy series rang in my ear as "Passion" unfolded before me, unexpectedly deepening my understanding of Fosca. The series mirrors "Passion" in a fascinating way, both thematically and narratively. Rebecca Bunch (Rachel Bloom), too, is a complex mentally ill character whose unhappiness in life has her moving across the country to be with the man she's hopelessly, desperately in love with — who is, to her displeasure, already committed to a beautiful woman. She constantly manipulates her love interest, Josh Chan (Vincent Rodriguez III), as well as those around him, in order to grow closer to him and make him love her. But Bloom, "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend's" co-creator as well as its star, isn't getting, "Die, Rebecca! Die!" as a primary response. On a surface level, it's difficult to understand why, considering the abundant similarities between the two works. "Passion" makes no attempt at hiding the deplorability of its characters, particularly Fosca, but neither does "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend." In an interview with the Vulture TV Podcast, Bloom said, "This is a show about someone who's made a bad decision, and is in many ways a bubbly antihero. We're taking happy tropes of songs and exploring a darker side to them." For all the show's pep and jokiness, much of Rebecca's behavior — and, by extension, that of her enabling confidant Paula (Donna Lynne Champlin), who edges her and Josh closer together in much the same way as Fosca's doctor does with Giorgio in her time of need — should be considered reprehensible. Just as Fosca forces herself into Giorgio's life by potentially feigning or overdramatizing her illness and luring him into situations that will bring her close to him, Rebecca Bunch exploits her loneliness and newcomer status to force herself into Josh's friend group. Unlike Fosca, Rebecca is in denial about her circumstances, her behavior, and her love for Josh ("I didn't move here for Josh, I just needed a change"). She lives under the pretense that she is a good person (as explored in the song "I'm a Good Person"), even though she knows she's making unsavory decisions. Fosca, meanwhile, is honest in her intentions and thoroughly aware of her relentless feelings for Giorgio: "Loving you is not a choice; it's who I am." The similarities between the stories now even extend to the "other woman," with Josh's girlfriend Valencia (Gabrielle Ruiz) presented in a similar light to Clara in the most recent episode. Where Bloom previously faltered was in not treating Valencia with consistency, making her a shallow mean girl and saddling her with amusing solo tunes ("I'm So Good at Yoga" and "Women Gotta Stick Together") that offered no insight into her character. It was only in this week’s episode, "Josh Is Going to Hawaii!" that Valencia's willingness to understand Josh's feelings and work at their relationship became visible, accompanied by Rebecca's realization that she is "the villain in [her] own story."

5. Directors With/Vs. Subject: A True/False Festival Dispatch. The True/False Film Festival held in Columbia, Missouri showcases cutting-edge documentary filmmaking and the malleability of the form. Filmmaker Magazine's Vadim Rizov writes his first dispatch from the festival focusing on "documentaries [that] do — or antagonistically don't — try to serve as compassionate ambassadors to the world on behalf of their subjects."

Unambiguous Sympathy: Christopher LaMarca and Jessica Dimmock's "The Pearl"is a nighttime movie, all quiet, warmly illuminated interior spaces populated by a self-supporting community. I'm exaggerating a bit — it's not a movie actually literally set only in the dark (like Nikolaus Geyrhalter's "Abendland") — but "The Pearl," subjectively, is a bit of a safe space. That fits and supports the subjects: four middle-aged trans women, one of whom runs a communal living space out of a spare bedroom ("Amy's Outhouse"), all of whom need time and low-key support. While "The Pearl's" narrative includes transitional arcs for all its characters, much of the conflict and difficulty of transition is discussed but not shown. Nina, formerly Reinhardt, is shown returning to her wife after time away, changing into masculine attire in the car before driving home ("Back to Clark Kent," she cracks); her spouse is never shown, even though Nina conceals her gender identity from a partner of 40 years she fears would be unjustly hurt. Any scenes of friction with the outside world have similarly been (almost) completely excised. Refusing to give ear to transphobic voices, "The Pearl" thus normalizes its subjects' everyday lives. Discussions between the women re: sexual ideology and what it means to present yourself as "feminine" can be prickly — in voiceover, one questions what she characterizes as another woman's yoking of feminine identity to stereotypical housewife status — but are still conducted within a realm of unambiguous solidarity. If seen, contact with the outside world goes well (Nina's first trip to Victoria's Secret lends uncharacteristic joy to the lingerie franchise) or is only discussed. This is a conscious choice which helps plug viewers into a quieter realm of identification. What stayed with me the most was the film's capturing of specific spaces: Amy's golden-lit house at night, an fluorescently underlit pizza parlor where Nina works, the perpetually illuminated garage where two trans siblings worked alongside each other for years, unaware they shared the same status. Floating from location to location without definitively marking the passage of time, "The Pearl" floats from liminal space to space — a fitting match for its subjects.

Clear-Eyed-But-Nobody's-Off-The-Hook Sympathy: "What's the deal with that guy?" someone asked me, puzzled after watching Roberto Minervini's "The Other Side." To give a quick answer, I turned to my interview with the director from last year. Explaining his intentions for this portrait of down-and-out life in the left-for-dead community of West Monroe, Louisiana — the first half profiles dispossessed heroin addicts Mark Kelley and Lisa Allen, the second breaks off to follow a militia during training — the Italian-born Minervini emphasized compassionate identification with subjects whose behavior spirals from merely disturbing to the outright terrifying. "I've already approached the topics of pain and fear, and I needed to dig into the sociopolitical causes of it," he said. "It was time for me as an American filmmaker, living and working in America, to look for the responsibility at an institutional level. The fact that people need to find a shield in violence and drugs, behind weapons — no matter if they are syringes, AR-15s or assault rifles — the fact that people feel the need to protect themselves in America is something that's not only anachronistic but it's brutal." Some fairly obvious answers about economic stratification, institutionalized venality et al. suggest themselves, none of which are explicitly fingered. These are bands of outsiders intensely loyal to family and friends, convinced the [insert Tarantino's favorite epithet] in the White House is responsible for their lot in life; such casual racism regularly punctures Mark's otherwise genial surface. Acutely aware of who he is, cracking wise about his narcotic habits, Mark looks out for relations even broker than he is, even if the most he can do is hook up his sister with heroin for free. One scene raises the specter of institutional neglect: Mark tells his girlfriend that after his mother dies, he'll turn himself in for a crime whose three-month sentence he ran out on. Why? So that he can finally get clean, something he simply can't do otherwise. What kind of society ensures its poorest can only get adequate drug treatment if they offer themselves up for harvesting by the prison-industrial complex? The militia is headed by veterans convinced it's only a matter of time before martial law ships us all off to the FEMA concentration camps. (Alex Jones and his ilk bear considerable moral responsibility for poisoning the already-paranoid's minds with this toxic nonsense, which obscures our bought-and-paid-for legislature’s destructive actions, even though they're in plain public view.) The sight of angry men with itchy trigger fingers just waiting for a chance to shoot somebody — to defend their family and a very nebulously understood Constitution — is depressingly unsurprising but illuminating in its specifics. Again, they are people who mean well: in one scene, a militia leader correctly diagnoses our foreign policy as a repeated matter of imposing ourselves upon other nations with no regard for the consequences, before making an illogical leap to conspiratorial terrain: if it happens abroad, it's only a matter of time before it happens at home. When accurately perceiving their government just doesn't care about them, people can go crazy. The final image — a shot-/blown-up car spray-painted with anti-Obama rhetoric in flames, with somebody whooping "America!" — isn't subtle, but it's a real thing that happened and a key starting image for understanding Trump's Vision, or what he pretends to believe anyway. The film is beautifully shot (by Diego Suarez-Llanos) and richly experiential, and more shattering for both those traits.

Tweet(s) of the Day:

Ever notice has Lucy yanks the football away from Charlie Brown, and is also his psychiatrist? She controls the supply and the demand.

— Greg Wissinger (@gwiss) March 11, 2016

"No one calls me chicken" barely made sense as a Back to the Future plot and now it's the platform of the leading GOP candidate.

— Matt Roller (@rolldiggity) March 11, 2016

'Tickled': Why The Online Fetish Doc Was Hit With A Defamation Lawsuit

Chris O'Falt — Wed, 09 Mar 2016 16:57:51 GMT

On Sunday at the annual True/False Film Fest, David Farrier, the New Zealand co-director of "Tickled," was served with papers for a defamation lawsuit filed by David D'Amato, one of the subjects of his Sundance hit documentary. The legal action stemmed from Utah, where "Tickled" premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this past January, and in Missouri, where True/False is based. It was hardly a surprise for Farrier, and it wasn't even the most bizarre interaction he had over the weekend with representatives from Jane O'Brien Media, the company "Tickled" eventually reveals to be run by D'Amato.

The strange history of "Tickled" started well before the documentary was even conceived. Farrier’s relationship with Jane O’Brien Media — according to the filmmaker — began a couple years ago, when he came across the company's peculiar website. The site called for men 18-24 to submit head shots to be considered as potential contestants in an endurance tickling contest. If selected to participate in the filmed competition, contestants would be given $1,500, flown to Los Angeles and put up for a lavish all-expenses-paid weekend. Farrier, a New Zealand-based journalist and blogger, contacted Jane O’Brian Media, first via email then Facebook, informing the owners of his interest in writing a story about their contests.

"Their first reply was 'we don't want to deal with a homosexual journalist,'" Farrier told Indiewire in a conversation during True/False. "That comment is what kicked this whole thing off. They wrote that on their public Facebook page. Not only is it homophobic, it's odd, especially because this tickling sport does seem a little gay." Initially, Farrier and co-director Dylan Reeve started blogging about the incident, which prompted notices from a New York attorney and a local lawyer in New Zealand, both alleging defamation. "They sent a whole haul of abusive emails about my sexuality that got weirdly racist, anti-semitic at times — just hateful, weird emails," Farrier said, "but hearing from a real lawyer was when it became a real thing. So we knew right from the onset this was a litigious company."

For Farrier and Reeve, the initial lawsuit was also an indication there was far more to the story. So they started an investigation, in the form of a documentary film, to find out who was behind Jane O’Brien Media. To protect themselves, they received help from two pro bono attorneys and were meticulous to make sure they did everything necessary to protect themselves against potential lawsuits.

The movie goes on to expose troubling practices committed by the company. D'Amato is now suing the filmmakers claiming defamation and negligent in the infliction of emotional distress.

During Sundance, a Jane O'Brien staffer attended one of the screenings. "Sundance security told me that he was there, but I didn't want to tell the audience," Farrier said. "Essentially the audience is watching this person on screen, and they aren't necessarily coming across in a good light, and I didn’t want everybody there going, ‘Oh, God, he's in the cinema.’ From what I understand [during the screening] he made a lot of loud 'hurmph' noises and took extensive notes on a legal pad."

That same man was at the True/False, but this time he brought many others, as Farrier was informed the company had bought a number tickets to this weekend’s screenings. During one, an audience member was alleged to be pirating the film

"Security noticed someone was in the theater holding a coffee cup in a very suspicious way," Farrier said. "He wasn't moving the cup, just holding it up like he was filming the screen. So they told me and asked what they should do. I requested they stop him because I was assuming there was a camera in the coffee cup." After festival staffers confronted the man and another audience member, both of whom Farrier has reason to believe were private investigators from New York. When the festival's security requested that they leave, they refused — until the movie was turned off and a pair of police officers removed both men.

Farrier is confident that he and the film are on solid legal ground — and it's clear that the involvement of both HBO and Magnolia, who recently signed on to distribute the film, has given him peace of mind.

"Their confidence was reassuring," Farrier said. Still, he admitted that he’s a little jealous of his fellow documentarians, who were carefree as they shared their films with the doc loving True/False crowd. "Being served," he said, "really takes you off guard...even though I was expecting it to happen."

At True/False 2016, Filmmakers Inside the Frame

Sam Adams — Tue, 08 Mar 2016 20:07:10 GMT

The most important movie of the 2016 True/False Film Festival may turn out to be a 30-minute short produced by three students from the University of Missouri. "Concerned Student 1950," which was only completed on Wednesday, debuted at 11:30 on a Saturday night, but the audience of a thousand-plus viewers who filled the Missouri Theater in downtown Columbia was electric, cheering the heroes and booing the villains as the film chronicled the protests that erupted after Mizzou's administration turned a blind eye t0 racist incidents on campus. (The "1950" in the film's, and the group's, name comes from the year the university's first black student was admitted.) The movement, which successfully pressed for the removal of university president Tim Wolfe, made national news, and the screening of "Concerned Student," which was directed by Varun Bajaj and Adam Dietrich and produced by Kellan Marvin, did too, not least because Spike Lee, who's working on a "30 for 30" about the Mizzou football team's involvement in the protests, was spotted in the audience. (He also turned up at a student house party afterwards, and commenced conducting his own interviews on Monday.) But it also grew out of True/False's profound connection to the local community, and its alliance with the university's Murray Center for Documentary Journalism, which recently installed True/False veteran Robert Greene as its first filmmaker in residence.

An opening title informs us that "Concerned Student," which will be available on the Field of Vision website in a week or two — update: here it is — documents the protest movement from the inside, and the film has the strengths, and some of the weaknesses, of embedded reportage. It opens with the rehearsal for a protest in which black students detail their direct encounters with racism, and it's at its best when showing us how these burgeoning activists coordinate their collective message with the precision of a guerrilla theater troupe. (One student paraphrases "Hamilton" when she declares "This is not a moment. This is a movement.") The moments that went viral — a student demanding Wolfe define "systematic oppression"; teacher Melissa Click, who was fired by Mizzou's Board of Curators last week, calling for "muscle" to block journalists from shooting the victory celebration — appear here, but they're placed in context rather than strewn across the net. The protestors' antagonism towards national media makes a lot more sense when you see a Fox News journalist conclude an interview by sneering, "Go out there and start earning a living."

The issue of when and how to film was central to many of True/False's movies, in which the negotiation between filmmaker and subject frequently took place on-camera. In "Sonita," an aspiring Afghan rapper asks director Rokhsareh Ghaemmaghami to shut off the camera so she can remove her headscarf and go to sleep, prefiguring the film's central dilemma of whether and when a documentary filmmaker has the obligation to stop filming and start helping. In "Peter and the Farm," a Vermont organic farmer expresses regret over having told one of his apparently endless supply of stories in the wrong setting, simultaneously acting as subject and stage manager. And in "Weiner," the scandal-plagued New York congressman snaps at the filmmakers for asking him a question at a tense moment, asking what species of fly-on-the-wall it is that talks. (While we're pulling back the veil: The festival paid for my travel and lodging, as they have for the last three years.)

No movie negotiated those exchanges better, or more thoughtfully, than Kirsten Johnson's "Cameraperson." A veteran documentary D.P. whose credits include "Citizenfour" and "Fahrenheit 9/11," Johnson went back to the raw footage of the more than two dozen films she's shot to look for "moments that marked me." From the opening sequence, in which we see Johnson's hands reach into frame to pluck at a stray blade of grass encroaching on a low-angle shot, the movie reminds us that every image in a documentary is constructed, and that the decisions behind it have consequences. In a panel discussion with critic Eric Hynes, Johnson recalled balking at a director's request to film a tracking shot of a group of Sudanese refugees, which she felt would have turned them from individuals into an undifferentiated mass. (As Jean-Luc Godard put it: "A tracking shot is a moral affair.") In "Cameraperson," she's asked to place two women in the background, and she asks, "Why don't we get them in the foreground?"

Johnson's conscientiousness stuck with me through True/False, as did the questions "Cameraperson" poses. Brett Story's "The Prison in Twelve Landscapes," the strongest of the festival's three world premieres, assembles a composite portrait of a nation (ours) in which mass incarceration has infected every aspect of public life. In Appalachia, prisons fill the spaces left by vanished coal companies, one of few recession-proof industries whose jobs can't be shipped overseas. In Queens, an ex-convict starts a business assembling care packages that meet the prisons' strict and often arbitrary restrictions: CDs are contraband, but cassettes are allowed, although they have to held together with glue, not screws, and must come in clear plastic cases. (Kanye West may be forsaking physical media, but you can still get "Yeezus" on tape, as long as you're locked up.) Outside traffic court in Missouri's St. Louis county, Story films a long line of largely African-American citizens waiting to pay off fines, obliquely referencing the post-Ferguson revelation that the region's police were overwhelmingly targeting people of color for minor offenses. (There's your definition of "systematic oppression.") The way Story shoots them en masse immediately called Johnson's hesitation to mind, but the film cannily selects moments where her fleeting subjects eye the camera with curiosity, and sometimes distrust. We're forced to question why she's filming, and why (and how) we're watching.

David Farrier, the co-director and onscreen center of "Tickled," turned out to be the anti-Johnson; I had to watch "Cameraperson" again just to wash the taste of "Tickled" out of my mouth. We're in trouble from the opening moments, which show Farrier, whom we're helpfully informed is "New Zealand's favorite pop-culture reporter," sitting thoughtfully at his computer in carefully lit shots that establish him as our unequivocal hero. Although the movie starts as a lighthearted investigation into the world of "competitive endurance tickling," in which buff, restrained young men are tickled to the point where laughter turns into pain, it turns prosecutorial when Farrier discovers a trail of payoffs and recrimination going back decades. (Spoilers follow.) The movie leads Farrier to a wealthy tickle fetishist with a long history of retaliating against anyone who's dared to slip from his grasp, a serial abuser against whom any tactic would seem justified — or at least, that's how "Tickled" presents him. But the way Farrier and Reeve, who are themselves not without significant resources, deploy the apparatus of documentary against their target reeks of self-righteous zeal: Farrier more than once explains he's locked onto his subject because he hates "bullies," never stopping to consider, at least on screen, that he might have crossed that line himself. Farrier claimed in the post-screening Q&A that the movie's not about targeting fetishists, and he does include a segment in which he visits with a genial maker of tickle porn. But he also makes sure to throw in a shot of his own bemused face as he's watching a tickle video being shot, reassuring the audience that he's not like those freaks, and it's fine for them to watch from a distance. At least "Tickled" provided True/False 2016 with its second shot of national news: Two of the figures who feature in the movie were kicked out of a screening for attempting to bootleg the film, and Farrier was greeted outside the festival's Filmmaker Fete with a subpoena informing him he's being sued for defamation.

The young Tehran women and men in Mehrdad Oskouei's "Starless Dreams" and "The Last Days of Winter" have, in some cases, committed more serious crimes than anything alleged in "Tickled." But Oskouei, who received the festival's career-spanning "True Vision" award, approaches them with an open heart, even when he's talking to a girl who killed her own father. Oskouei's films, based on this too-small sampling, are penetrating but gentle: When he asks the women in a Tehran juvenile detention center about their crimes, his questions are direct but his voice has the warm understanding of a genial psychotherapist. Some of the children relate horrific backstories — he often asks if adults bothered them, with the word "bother" ominously in quotes — but there's an elusive serenity to the movies as well; he'd sooner provide his young subjects a moment of peace than squeeze them dry and toss them away. Although "Starless Dreams" and "The Last Days of Winter" are quite distinct, especially in the degrees of hope they hold out for young Iranian men and young women, they each contain a moment where a subject Oskouei is interviewing draws attention to the boom mic hanging just above the frame. The girls in "Starless Dreams" even take turns interviewing each other, using a pale green mug as microphone. Their lives may be out of control, but Oskouei returns to them some degree of agency, even if it only lasts until the lights come up.

True/False: The Director of 'All These Sleepless Nights' Doesn't Care if You Think His Film is Nonfiction

Chris O'Falt — Mon, 07 Mar 2016 18:49:02 GMT

READ MORE: 'Concerned Student 1950' Documentary to Screen for Free at True/False Film Festival

If you walked into a screening not knowing anything about "All These Sleepless Nights" — a film about two young men and their journey through the party scene in Warsaw, Poland — you might not realize you were watching a documentary. The low-light, nighttime cinematography is not grainy, the performances have a dramatic-in-the-moment feel to them and the use of cinematic language is intentionally precise, complete with a smooth moving camera that glides the viewer through packed dance floors. It's the type boundary-pushing nonfiction film that is championed by the True/False Film Fest, where "Sleepless Nights" screened this weekend.

Writer-director-cinematographer Michal Marczak sat down with Indiewire after his first screening to discuss how he shot the film and explain why he finds the discussion over what is nonfiction, and what is not, to be completely boring.

How did find you your subjects, Michal and Krzysztof?

I guess I have to go back to why I wanted to make this film. I don't like coming-of-age or teen movies. Most of them are really oversimplified and there's only a few in the history of cinema that I've really enjoyed. Walking around Warsaw, though, I realized there's a new generation that has sprung up and it's a little bit different. Although there isn't that much of an age difference between them and I, there is obvious differences. Those differences intrigued me. So I came up with the idea of making a movie about this new young crowd.

How is the new young crowd different?

Warsaw now has this new identity, a new cool that has arisen. Of course everything is influenced and globalized, but I feel like Warsaw has its own little style that has developed, kind of how Berlin was when I was 19 and I felt like all the new stuff was happening there. I now feel that energy is in Warsaw, so I wanted to capture it.

I walked around for a half a year looking for stories, looking for characters, looking for locations, seeing what had changed since I was young and going to clubs. For a long time I couldn't find anybody who I felt really attracted to, then one day I was at a house party and I saw Michal and Krzys, the two main characters. They were talking far away and the way they articulated with their body language really attracted me. I was into their conversation just by looking at them. I approached them and my interest just grew. It was love at first sight.

How long did you work with them before you started shooting?

Three months. For me, it is really important that everybody — with the crew, secondary characters and locations — that we are all on one page. That once we started shooting that it was an organic start — we've already had all these conversations and adventures and saw what this could be. For a small project, that kind of connectivity is really important.

And how long did you shoot?

A year and a half. I wanted it to have two summers with a winter in between. I knew that was the minimum amount of time that you could see some change in them.

I know it's non-fiction—

—well, it's kind of both.

Certainly your subjects embraced the performance aspect of the film. There are a lot of scenes I have a hard time imagining you simply following them around, especially with what felt like well-choreographed camera moves. This feels much more like a collaboration between a director and his cast.

It was a total collaborative process. I'm not very clear on labels and it's up to other people if they want to call this a documentary. Many times we’re playing off real emotions and the starting points for the characters were their real lives. It definitely evolved. Each scene was devised differently. A lot of it was improvisation. We did a bunch of improv workshops, which is based on slow comedy. It's alot of being really attentive and in the moment, trying to make your partner the best possible player. It's about being being responsive, which is also the role I set up for myself as the cinematographer.

Each scene in the film is devised differently. There wasn't one methodology, beyond living through the moments and making sure there are emotions in the flow of the scene. We also talked alot about cinema — what works for cinema, what doesn't. When you are working with non-actors it doesn't help to talk about anything really specific. You can't rehearse to get at the emotions you want, you have to sort of talk around it.

There's women that come in and out of Michal and Krzysztof's lives. I'm assuming not all of them were necessarily onboard with becoming characters in your movie. Eva, who plays such a huge role in a portion of this film, clearly embraced her role, but I can't imagine that was the case for others.

That was the part of the first three months beforehand, figuring out who would be involved. You need the places, the clubs, the secondary characters and the people in the background to be involved. A big part of the first three months was getting to know their entire social milieu and seeing who would work in the film. I did a lot of camera tests in the beginning. In doing those tests I was trying to see who was drawn to the camera and who hid and got shy.

I was also looking at my circle of friends to see who would work well emotionally with these characters in terms of their energy without the camera there. Then after, when the camera comes in, we can see what stays and what doesn't. Eva was my idea. I had a scene in mind between her and Krzys—

—Sorry, just want to be clear here. Are you saying that Eva was your idea and you introduced her to the boys? Because Eva definitely seems to have a very real romantic relationship with Krzystof and a history with Michal.

Yeah, this is a weird thing, and I'm not sure I can say this, but I use to date her for a little while. And I just knew she had this amazing energy. She never thought about acting, but she just kind of did it. Some people just have that in them and when you see it, you know it.

Warsaw is a small city, we're all friends of friends, and it turns out a lot of my friends are friends of the main characters and there was a lot of connections. And it just turns out, I didn't know this, but Eva — because she never wanted to talk about her past — that she did really have a past relationship with Michal. That was a coincidence. And I just felt like there was an underlying emotion that connects her and Krzys, and what I had in mind was just a scene where I knew something would happen. I guess I have to explain one other thing. Whenever I test characters, I always like to do it in a real environment with the real camera.

So that scene at the beach party where we meet Eva, is that one of these test scenes where you are bringing everyone together?

Exactly. That's the whole thing with working in this technique, sometimes the best things happen spontaneously at the beginning. So I know my camera test has to possibly be a scene in the film. And that camera test became a major scene in the film and the beginning of their love relationship and it totally happened.

So Eva and Krzys had a real romance?

Absolutely. They were together for a half a year. But when I devised that scene, I thought it might be a little fling. I knew she would come in and mess things up, but I just thought she maybe a one scene thing and then at the end of that night I felt like, "Oh, we're onto something more," because the whole thing sparked. And the whole backstory with Michal came up, and that just added another dimension to it. I tried many times with other people and there just was no chemistry. It's just one of those things. It's really cool to go into something and try it and be able to have it on film and then not recreate it later.

I'm glad you brought up camera tests because with most documentaries we have learned to live with really grainy, ugly images in low light and evening scenes. Your footage — and your movie largely takes place at night — is gorgeous. So is part of this you are also scouting the right clubs, beaches and only picking locations where you can get the light right? Did you dismiss locations where Michal and Krzysztof would normally go and simply decide not to shoot there?

Of course. I spent a lot of time on this. The rig I shot with I built myself — it's a gyroscope rig on a steady cam arm, it's a bunch of different parts. I built it from the ground up with parts. The right side had a specially designed computer controller so I could change the settings while I shot, and I had a follow focus that, with the help of engineers, I designed. And basically everything was rooted to a battery in a backpack, so I could go out and film for 12 hours. I'm really meticulous about this, it took almost four months to build because all the parts really had to fit together. And I'd bring a couple different cameras and lenses for different situations.

It must have been a really fast camera and lenses?

Really fast lenses and the [camera was the Sony] AS7s for the night shots. The reason I had to build the rig myself is no one makes things that are that small and that light weight. In order to shoot for that long of a time I needed to build it with titanium and custom made parts. It had to be small, so I could fit in between the people dancing and not bump into people.

So, yeah, I did pick the locations based on lighting. Also with lighting, whenever it wasn't a good time to shoot, I would hold everybody back and wait. If you think about it people resonate with nature and they resonate with light. It's like when there was a house party and then all of the sudden a sunrise comes up that always brings energy to people. And if you just play a good track at that time, all of the sudden everyone is rejuvenated.

Many other parties I would come in before and set up my own lights, so that nobody at the party would think the lighting was there for my filming. It was all very low level and small units. When my friends were creatings a beach party, I would say can I show up five hours early and set up the lights. Most of the time they are all into the music side and getting the speakers right, so they were happy to have someone come in and do lighting for them. I always did the lighting with the idea of creating a beautiful mood, or creating mood that felt intimate and allowed people to feel in the moment. So yeah, a lot of choosing locations and pre-lighting, but also building lights in [the subjects'] house that I put on dimmers, but it was all stuff that no one would notice and it stayed their for a half a year.

Watching it often feels like you are a director trying to get your shot rather than pulling back and documenting the unfolding of a scene. The film is filled with really intimate close ups, layered compositions and complicated camera moves.

Definitely, especially with a film like this where it's about the nuances and subtleties and you don't want to convey certain things through language, you want to do it through the mood, or the look, or the pace, or framing, to build the emotions and the dramaturgy. It's super important.

One of things that really helped me was I worked really closely with my editor [Dorota Wardeszkiewicz], who is 76 and editied with [Krzysztof] Kieslowski, and we've been working together for five years. What I learned from her is the extreme rigor of editing and that's the most important thing for a camera operator is to be an amazing editor. When you are shooting in an improvisized way, the only way to do this is to remember what you've shot, what the angles are and what you are missing. Editing was the thing that helped me make the biggest leap as a cinematographer. When I shoot I keep in mind the setups I have. So if I need a close up, I'll spend the next hour trying to find a time I can get one without asking [the performers] to do something, because they aren't actors and when you ask them to do something it doesn't feel right. Or I'm creating situations that are similar to what is happening, that has high emotional content, where I can go back to get that close up.

There were shots where I did mulitple takes, but it's mostly the technical stuff. It's more about doing alternate takes. You do a really nice master shot, but for some reason it doesn't work out, you never repeat that shot, you try to create another emotional situation where you do another master shot that takes a completely different route, but conveys the same emotion. Maybe a scene is made up of three master shots, I have one, and I know what the the rhythm should be, so I'm waiting for a situation where I can get the same rhythm of the camera through the characters. It's alot of memorization actually and reacting to the moment, but when you work with the same people over a long periodd of time it's easier. We anticipate each others movements, which is how we can get these complex camera moves and no one fucks up the frame.

How many people were you shooting with you behind the camera?

Depends, sometimes just me and a sound person.

And is the sound always a shotgun mic on a boom?

That's why I did a lot of ADR [Additional Dialogue Recording, recording character's dialogue in post-production], it's the boom that really annoys people. It's the boom that really fucks up all these complex master shots. Most of the time we had lav mics, with the idea of going into ADR to re-do most of it.

How much of the film was ADR?

About 80%.

So you really needed characters to commit to being part of the film until the very end, break ups and all, if you knew going in a majority of the lines would be re-recorded in post?

That's what I told the people from the start. As soon as we a got an idea of what the character could be, I'd talk about what the character's arc and where this could lead and I'd say, are you in or are you not, because I need to know now. Because the dramatrugy is really close to real life, so most people know where this might end up and it might end up in a really fucked up situation and they can anticipate that. We went on a journey together and with every shot you build that trust.

Before the introduction of the film, you mentioned that while you were editing you had the True/False audience in mind. How much of that is because of the things we are talking about — a nonficiton community that's not about the rigid lines of what a documentary can be, but that embraces cinematic expression and the blurring of lines with fiction?

It's true because I think that whole conversation about is this fiction, or is this documentary, is so old and overdone. Anybody who knows the history of cinema or made a film, knows these things are irrelevant. "Nanook of the North" was entirely staged. I rather talk about the emotions and what Josh Oppenheimer talks about, which is people performing. We all perform in front of each other. It's about creating personas and this movie is all about finding your own persona and finding a persona that makes you feel good. I'd rather talk about that, then a boring conversation about is it fiction or nonfiction.

I really wanted to make a film about youth and all those crazy emotions associated with it and the fragmentary nature of it and how once you are past that period in your life you have to look back and make your own narrative about it. That's how I felt when I got into my 30s. All those crazy and random things that happened, I'm only now making sense of it. That was the idea of the structure of the film was to make a movie of moments where the audience has to connect the dots. When I knew I wanted to do this I knew there wasn't enough really good young actors that had that new vibe to them, or that represented the style of how I wanted to tell the story, so I knew I would have to work with non-actors or people off the streets, because that's where the energy is. Even in high budget films I feel like the crowd in the background is fake and they aren't dancing to the actual music, or people are pretending to be drunk, so I really wanted that authenticity of Warsaw and I knew I couldn't do anything that would distract or interfere with the mode and atmosphere I wanted to capture.

I actually postponed production by three months because the controller for the gyroscope weren't good enough to give me this fluid camera movement, which I knew I wanted to have because I wanted all the tools of cinema at my disposal. I need to be able to utilize the ways of framing and telling the story with images. That's what's so exciting, is these tools are now such that we can shoot cinematically with a no crew and in an improvised way. That has always been my dream and technology is finally there.

READ MORE: True/False Film Festival: Why It Makes Sense To Have a Secret Screening Before Your World Premiere

True/False: 'Concerned Student 1950' Premieres to Emotionally Charged Crowd, Including Spike Lee

Chris O'Falt — Sun, 06 Mar 2016 17:03:42 GMT

READ MORE: True/False Film Fest: Why It Makes Sense To Have a Secret Screening Before Your World Premiere

In November of last year, protests led by a group of African American students at the University of Missouri erupted and caused a national media storm. Last night, only four months after the events that led to the resignation of school President Tim Wolfe, the True/False Film Fest premiered "Concerned Student 1950," a 30 minute documentary about the protests made by undergraduates at the university.

The film offers a rare glimpse inside the demonstrations. Rare because the student activists, who call themselves Concerned Student 1950, made a conscience choice to shut out the local and national media as they slept in the middle of the campus quad. The film covers the big moments that became national news, but more than anything it brings to light just how fearful and unwelcome African American students felt on campus and the tremendous emotional toll those two weeks took on the group. The protests were sparked by graduate student Jonathan Butler’s hunger strike in demand of Wolfe’s resignation following a number of racially charged events on campus and the administrations’ failure to address African American students’ concerns. As Butler visibly becomes weak and President Wolfe drags his heels, the film captures just how dire the stakes were for the members of Concerned Student 1950.

The emotions captured in the film were evident in last night’s audience, which was packed with University of Missouri students for whom the issues addressed in the film were clearly still raw. Before the film even began the filmmakers received a standing ovation, while five of the original members of Concerned Student 1950 took to the stage to make clear their struggle did not end with Wolfe’s resignation. After the screening the group led the audience in one of their protest chants, while receiving their second standing ovation of the night. A surprise guest in the audience was Spike Lee, who Indiewire has learned is interested in using some of the footage from the documentary for his own ESPN project "2 Fists Up," about the Missouri football teams' role in the protests. (The film will be released digitally on May 31.)

True/False co-founder David Wilson introduced the movie, admitting that circumstances leading to last night’s premiere were unusual, as he himself only saw a cut of the film last week and that normally a last-minute addition like this would be out of the question. The school and film's connection to the festival though runs deep. A number of the festival screenings take place on campus and many of the panel discussions take place at the University’s Murray School of Journalism, where the "Concerned Student 1950" filmmakers Varun Bajaj, Adam Dietrich and Kellan Marvin study.

In addition, the student filmmakers' professor is Robert Greene, a filmmaker himself ("Kate Plays Christine," which premiered at Sundance in January) whose work is a staple at True/False; while the film’s producers are Laura Poitras’ Field of Vision, who sponsored this year’s True/False panel discussions. Just to show how intertwined the film became with the festival, co-director Dietrich told Indiewire the first person who gave the students the idea to start filming the protests was True/False programmer Chris Boeckmann.

Field of Vision will premiere "Concerned Student 1950" online in approximately two weeks.

True/False Film Festival: Why It Makes Sense To Have a Secret Screening Before Your World Premiere

Chris O'Falt — Thu, 03 Mar 2016 18:38:47 GMT

One of the unique aspects of the True/False Film Festival, which begins this week in Columbia, Missouri, is its secret screenings. These are showcases for documentaries with world premieres scheduled later in the year at other major festivals. To preserve the world premiere status, True/False keeps the title of the film under wraps, with the audience not knowing what they're about to watch until the curtains open and the movie begins. Meanwhile, members of press in attendance are embargoed from mentioning the film’s title — and prohibited from writing about it in any way that may reveal its identity.

According to the festival's co-founder David Wilson, the secret screenings were born out of a desire to show the best films possible, while acknowledging that other larger festivals like SXSW, Tribeca and Cannes offer a platform that they cannot. "We know that by design that True/False is not a marketplace," Wilson told Indiewire in a recent interview. "We know that True/False — while being as carefully curated collection of attending press — does not have the sheer numbers of press you'll see at other market festivals."

But True/False is certainly one thing: a celebration of nonfiction filmmaking that has, over the last decade, become the favorite festival for many in the documentary community. And while the secret screenings may be kept under wraps for practical reasons, they have also become an important step for many filmmakers bringing their films into the world.

"Filmmakers are often freaked out showing their films for the first time...in a way, we are giving them a dress rehearsal," explained Wilson. "Filmmakers at first often don't know how to talk about their films, so they learn this in the process of screening. They learn how audiences respond." More specifically, they're ready to handle the reactions. "They learn what kind of questions they get and how to craft a good response to those questions," Wilson added. " I've watched a number of filmmakers use their secret screenings to learn what they made, how other people see that, and how they can talk about it."

That insight is also something filmmakers can use to re-edit their film before their world premiere. What often gets lost in the lonely months of editing is how the audience will react, which can dictate so many choices for an editor. According to Wilson, it has become common practice after secret screenings for filmmakers to tweak their films, making both big and small changes, before their premieres.

"They may play it and realize they totally stepped on one of their laughs because they themselves stopped laughing at the material months ago," explain Wilson. "They may even reorder a scene with the knowledge of how the audience responded to the material. You never can know exactly how an audience will react at certain moments of a film until you screen it, and that information can be invaluable to a filmmaker."

More than anything, the True/False secret screenings allow filmmakers to enjoy showing their films for the first time. The pressure of unveiling a film at a major festival — where members of the press are tweeting 140 character reviews and distributors are determining the film’s marketability — can be tremendous. In many ways, those first few days of unveiling a film to the world can dictate its future. What can get lost for some filmmakers is the reason they dedicated years of their lives to making the film in the first place.

"I'm sure these people exist, [but] I don't anyone in the doc world who make films so they can sell them and make money," said Wilson. "It's a terrible idea if you did...you really blew it if that’s the case." He emphasized the non-industry leanings of the True/False audience. "They don't care about the festival life of your film, or what release strategy is going to work, or early awards chatter," he said. "They just want to engage in the film itself and see the world in a way they never have before."

The True/False Film Festival is March 3-6.

'Concerned Student 1950' Documentary to Screen for Free at True/False Film Festival

Kristen Santer — Wed, 02 Mar 2016 19:08:47 GMT

READ MORE: Oscar Winner Laura Poitras on How Field of Vision Will Change Documentary Filmmaking

The True/False Film Festival will bring a free screening of "Concerned Student 1950" to the public this weekend. The festival is collaborating with the visual journalism field unit Field of Vision, who commissioned the short documentary film.

"Concerned Student 1950" is a short film by Varun Bajaj, Adam Dietrich and Kellan Marvin that follows the titular Black student activists at the University of Missouri, who helped to spark and rekindle a conversation about racism on college campuses last fall. Their widely popular protests involved typical to extreme reactions from a homecoming parade demonstration to a hunger strike. The activists were famously able to achieve their demand of getting President Tim Wolfe to resign. The filmmakers were given special permission to record these events as they occurred.

Out of this material, Bajaj, Dietrich and Marvin were able to create two short films. The first is a silent film called "#ConcernedStudent1950" and the second is 30-minute piece "Concerned Student 1950." Both will be released at the True/False Film Festival.

The Festival's Co-Conspirator David Wilson said in a statement, "Nonfiction filmmaking and journalism do not always have the same goals. But when extraordinary craft meets meticulous reporting as history gets made, this is as good as documentary gets. It is the festival's good fortune to partner with both the Murray Center for Documentary Journalism and Field of Vision to showcase young people on both sides of the camera lens."

"#ConcernedStudent1950" screens on Saturday, March 5 from 8 to 11 p.m. as part of the festival's Great Wall installation. "Concerned Student 1950" will be released this Saturday, March 5 at 11:30 p.m. at the Missouri Theatre to the public for free.

READ MORE: True/False Film Festival Unveils 2016 Lineup

Transcendent Exclusive Poster for 'The Pearl' Highlights its Real Characters

Kristen Santer — Wed, 02 Mar 2016 17:08:17 GMT

READ MORE: True/False Film Festival Unveils 2016 Lineup

The second feature film from photojournalist Jessica Dimmock and newcomer Christopher LaMarca, "The Pearl," will receive its international debut at the True/False Film Festival this Thursday, March 3. Dimmock previously produced and served as the cinematographer for the 2011 drama "Without." LaMarca recently helmed the upcoming documentary "Boone," which has been billed as a sensory and unsentimental peek behind the veil of the utopian dream of farming and will screen later this month at SXSW.

The movie is set in the hyper-masculine culture of Pacific Northwest logging towns, as four middle-aged transgender women struggle to find their true identity and solace among one another. Each of them must overcome their own personal struggles in order to discover happiness and peace.

No limited or wide release date has been set for "The Pearl." See the poster below.
READ MORE: 5 Reasons Why True/False Sets The Standard For Small Film Festivals

True/False Film Festival Unveils 2016 Lineup

Matt Brennan — Thu, 18 Feb 2016 16:48:14 GMT

The always-imaginative programming at True/False, founded in 2004 by festival organizers David Wilson and Paul Sturtz, also includes Brian Oakes' "Jim: The James Foley Story," which won the Audience Award at Sundance and recently aired on HBO, and Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady's portrait of legendary TV writer and producer Norman Lear, "Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You."

READ MORE: "Sundance Doc Audience Award Winner 'Jim: The James Foley Story' Paints Harrowing Portrait of ISIS Captive"

This year's theme, "Off the Trail," is inspired by "secret missions, treasure maps, personal geographies, and the virtue of being lost," as evidenced by selections "Behemoth," set in the remote grasslands of Inner Mongolia; "Another Country," a guided tour of the Australian outback, and "Michael Shannon Michael Shannon John," which seeks to locate a father who abandoned his family.

This year's world premieres are "The Pearl," a sensitive look at gender through the eyes of four middle-aged trans women; "The Prison In Twelve Landscapes," an essay film about the prison-industrial complex; and "Peter and the Farm," which unearth a rural tragedy in Vermont.

The 2016 True/False Film Festival runs March 3-6 in Columbia, Mo. Read the full list of features below, and find the festival's shorts program here.

READ MORE: "Sundance Norman Lear Doc 'Just Another Version of You' Goes to Netflix and Music Box"

2016 FEATURE SLATE

Another Country (dir. Molly Reynolds)
Aboriginal movie star David Gulpilil is our sardonic tour guide to the outback, where his people maintain a strong sense of history against creeping cultural imperialism.

The Bad Kids (dirs. Keith Fulton, Louis Pepe)
At an isolated, alternative high school, a firebrand principal tests the limits of tough love working with teenagers considered to be lost causes.

Behemoth (dir. Zhao Liang)
With restrained anger, Chinese filmmaker Zhao Liang brings us on a staggering journey into a modern-day Dante's Inferno, the pitch-black mines of Inner Mongolia.

Between Sisters (dir. Manu Gerosa)
Teresa and Ornella are sisters utterly devoted to one another despite a deeply buried secret between them.

Cameraperson (dir. Kirsten Johnson)
A profoundly compassionate globe-trotting memoir from behind the camera, bearing witness to the highs and lows of the human experience.

Fear of 13 (dir. David Sington)
Death row inmate Nick Yarris has the presence and poise of a Shakespearean thespian. But can he be believed?

Helmut Berger, Actor (dir. Andreas Horvath)
The most beautiful actor of his day is now a glorious wreck, and a trip to St. Tropez won't cure his ills.

Homeland (Iraq Year Zero) (dir. Abbas Fahdel)
This landmark epic is an immersive profile of one Iraqi family before and after the 2003 occupation.

The Illinois Parables (dir. Deborah Stratman)
Archival and original 16mm footage mesh with visionary sound design, as the singular Deborah Stratman tells a counter-narrative to how the Midwest was won.

Jim: The James Foley Story (dir. Brian Oakes)
Memorializing James Foley, a photojournalist who rushed both headlong and heroically into war zones.

Kate Plays Christine (dir. Robert Greene)
This artifice-spiked detective story follows rising movie star Kate Lyn Sheil down a rabbit hole inspired by Christine Chubbuck, a Sarasota newscaster who met a tragic end.

The Land of the Enlightened (dir. Pieter-Jan De Pue)
A boy's life, Afghani style, as a merry band of marauders extort, scavenge, and traverse a beautiful, bombed-out dreamscape.

The Last Days of Winter (dir. Mehrdad Oskouei)
The precursor to Starless Dreams - seven young Iranian detainees spill their secrets and their passions to True Vision award winner Mehrdad Oskouei.

Life, Animated (dir. Roger Ross Williams)
An enchanted, inspiring, true-life fairy tale: Owen Suskind struggles to speak until he finds his eccentric mentors, a band of Disney sidekicks.

Michael Shannon Michael Shannon John (dir. Chelsea McMullan)
Canadian siblings seek to solve the mystery of their father's disappearance - and learn what fate befell this charming rogue.

The Music of Strangers (dir. Morgan Neville)
Superstar cellist Yo-Yo Ma and his Silk Road Ensemble are on an uplifting mission to connect the world through music.

Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You (dirs. Heidi Ewing, Rachel Grady)
Sitcom king Norman Lear single-handedly revolutionized television. But what has he done lately?

Nosotras·Ellas (dir. Julia Pesce)
Julia Pesce tenderly films her family's intimate moments - nine women sharing a summer idyll in Argentina.

O Futebol (dir. Sergio Oksman)
A reunited father and son seek an elusive epiphany during the 2014 World Cup in São Paulo.

The Other Side (dir. Roberto Minervini)
Addiction, bigotry, and zealotry are set against the abiding love of family in the rubbed-raw intimacy of Roberto Minervini's latest.

The Pearl (dirs. Jessica Dimmock and Christopher LaMarca)
In a world far from glossy magazines featuring Laverne Cox, four middle-aged transgender women struggle to find recognition, refuge, and love.

Peter and the Farm (dir. Tony Stone)
Back-to-the-lander Peter Dunning has become one with his Vermont farm, perched somewhere between paradise and hell.

Presenting Princess Shaw (dir. Ido Haar)
Singer-songwriter Princess Shaw aspires to greatness, but is anyone listening?

The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (dir. Brett Story)
This impressionistic, piercing essay reveals a prison-industrial complex tightly woven into the the fabric of American life.

Secret Screening Aqua
The director recovers his castaway childhood by drawing on a vast archive of videotapes.

Secret Screening Navy
This blood-boiling essay about technology run amok pivots from bedrooms to backrooms.

Secret Screening Scarlet
Every emotion heightened, every moment vital, every connection new and electric.

Sherpa (dir. Jennifer Peedom)
In this visually soaring adventure, a tragic Mt. Everest avalanche exposes the relentless strains placed upon the guides.

Sonita (dir. Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami)
Dead-set against being sold as a bride, a feisty Afghan refugee breaks loose to become a rapper.

Starless Dreams (dir. Mehrdad Oskouei)
In this emotionally charged masterpiece, a group of underage female convicts dream of escaping the detention center and returning to their families.

Those Who Jump (dirs. Moritz Siebert, Estephan Wagner and Abou Bakar Sidibé)
In the mountain range between Morocco and Spain, thousands of men prepare to scale the imposing fences that stand between them and Europe.

Thy Father's Chair (dirs. Antonio Tibaldi and Alex Lora)
Twins Abraham and Shraga are prisoners of all the dreck piled high around their Brooklyn apartment - until concerned neighbors intercede.

Tickled (dirs. David Farrier and Dylan Reeve)
This news-of-the-weird story about a fringe sport morphs into a twisty tale of obsession, exploitation, sex, and blackmail.

Untitled Ramona Diaz Project - Work in Progress
From kangaroo moms to lost babies, there are dozens of stories in the world's largest maternity ward.

Weiner (dirs. Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg)
This raucous, fast-paced profile gets up close and personal as it encounters the exploits of dethroned New York politician Anthony Weiner.

Indiewire Podcast: The Best Movies at True/False

Indiewire — Fri, 13 Mar 2015 18:53:56 GMT

In the latest episode of Screen Talk, Criticwire editor Sam Adams fills in for Anne Thompson in a discussion with co-host Eric Kohn about the highlights of the True/False film festival, as well as whether or not film critics can be objective, and how to deal with those pesky "Ghostbusters" headlines. Plus: The best new movies in theaters this week.

READ MORE: Welcome to Indiewire's 'Very Good TV Podcast'

Screen Talk is available on iTunes. You can subscribe here or via RSS. Share your feedback with Thompson and Kohn on Twitter or sound off in the comments. Browse previous installments here, review the show on iTunes and be sure to let us know if you'd like to hear the hosts address specific issues in upcoming editions of Screen Talk.

How True/False Challenges the Way We See Documentary Films

Ashley Clark — Fri, 13 Mar 2015 15:45:24 GMT

As locals, filmmakers, journalists and sundry industry professionals streamed into the college town of Columbia, Missouri for the 12th edition of nonfiction film festival True/False — which concluded last Sunday — they were met with the sad news of the passing, at age 88, of legendary filmmaker Albert Maysles. In a long career, Maysles (alongside his brother David) was responsible, through pioneering films like "Salesman" and "Grey Gardens," for reshaping conventional notions around documentary filmmaking, in the process forging an American spin on cinéma vérité.

READ MORE: True/False Film Festival Announces 2015 Lineup

The brothers' playful, interrogative — and often ethically tricky — spirit was palpable across a program clearly based on the freeing premise that ambiguity is not just inherent in, but essential to, compelling nonfiction filmmaking. Tightly curated by founders and self-described "co-conspirators" David Wilson and Paul Sturtz (along with recent addition Chris Boeckmann), True/False's impressive variety acts as a corrective to the notion — still fairly prevalent outside cinephile circles, one suspects — that the prime purpose of documentary filmmaking is to "educate" the viewer by promulgating an objective truth, usually via some or other combination of talking head interviews, voiceovers and archive footage. While there is no doubt space in the culture for conventional issue docs and openly activist fare — even if you're not a fan of Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s "Blackfish", for example, it's hard to disavow its positive social impact — T/F's vital presence hammers home the point that the form has so much more to offer.

There was plenty to chew over in a diverse slate. This included meditations upon the nature of truth as refracted through who happens to be telling it, and how powerful they are (Joshua Oppenheimer's harrowing "The Look of Silence"; Zhou Hao's wry "The Chinese Mayor"); kaleidoscopic journalistic enquiry (Brit filmmaker Adam Curtis' "Bitter Lake", a messy, terrifying treatise on international relations); a retrospective collection of pioneering Polish curios curated by critic Ela Bittencourt; unpredictable Afrofuturistic docu-sci-fi (Adirley Queirós' outstanding "White Out, Black In"); and a bracing, brutal blurring of film and photojournalism in the form of Harlem filmmaker Khalik Allah's Bruce Davidson-inspired debut "Field Niggas" (my favorite film of the festival.)

Echoing last year's inclusion of Richard Linklater's "Boyhood" (which could be read as a meta-documentary on the fiction filmmaking process), there was also work that would traditionally be labeled as fiction. The Safdie brothers' "Heaven Knows What" is a case in point. Based upon star Arielle Holmes' diaristic record of her time as a heroin addict in New York, it's a grimy mesh of "My Own Private Idaho"'s oneiric fantasia and the intimate savagery of Larry Clark's "Kids". It might be rooted in recorded fact, but its overt stylization and fantastical flourishes elevate it to a more powerful realm of emotional truth.

READ MORE: Venice Review: Caleb Landry Jones Anchors Safdies' Must-See Junkie Drama 'Heaven Knows What'

Then there were the highly enjoyable and carefully-selected shorts packages, in which hilariously awkward snippets from Ronald Reagan's official archive (c/o "Manakamana" co-director Pacho Velez) could happily rub shoulders with bizarre vlog footage of country singer Garth Brooks attempting to "connect" with his audience, or an innovative "desktop documentary" by film critic Kevin B. Lee about the astonishing financial chicanery and audience manipulation behind Michael Bay's "Transformers: Age of Extinction".

The general standard was so high — and the films' boundary-pushing qualities so ubiquitous — that anything vaguely conventional became more conspicuous than it might ordinarily have appeared. For example, the last film I saw was Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville's "Best of Enemies," a rollicking, tightly-edited record of the series of 10 televised debates between William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal in the 1960s. The film includes so much wickedly amusing shade being thrown by the two men it's a wonder the screen doesn't end up fully in shadow. Ultimately its argument is convincing: these volatile clashes between egotistical public intellectuals paved the way for today's chronically polarized news culture. At the same time, the film left this viewer gasping for some ambiguity or formal innovation. I must have been spoiled by this point in the festival.

Festivals, of course, aren't entirely about the films, and T/F was notable for its gorgeous setting (many of the screenings take place on the University of Missouri's sprawling, leafy campus), slick organization, and relentlessly upbeat atmosphere. This particular vibe was most abundantly present in social gatherings, lively panels, and the raucous Gimme Truth! gameshow (an annual staple, whose in-joke-heavy fervor was slightly lost on this first-timer.) Also striking was the near-evangelical tones in which the festival was spoken of by locals, who beam with pride for the institution, and not without reason. On more than one occasion I became engaged in conversations with enthusiastic (often older, presumably moneyed) attendees who had parted with hundreds of dollars for the all-access weekend ticket, and were keen to hear recommendations as well as dispense their own tips.

With impressive attendance levels, near-unanimously positive feedback, and a growing public awareness of the radical possibilities offered by nonfiction filmmaking, it appears that T/F's star is well-placed to rise further. The chief challenge its organizers face will lie in retaining its signature regional, intimate atmosphere. But for now it remains happily intact.

READ MORE: 5 Reasons Why True/False Sets The Standard For Small Film Festivals

Daily Reads: When Supporting Character Take Over TV Shows, Why 'Empire' Is the Blockbuster TV Needs, and More

Max O'Connell — Fri, 13 Mar 2015 14:19:01 GMT

Criticwire's Daily Reads brings today's essential news stories and critical pieces to you.

1. Best Supporting Character Episodes. Mike's soliloquy on "Better Call Saul" prompted Vox's Todd VanDerWerff to pick his favorite episodes focusing on supporting players.

The supporting-character showcase can be particularly fruitful on a show with voiceover narration. Take, for instance, "My So-Called Life." In this episode, the narration shifts from protagonist Angela (Claire Danes) to her neighbor, the frustrated, nerdy Brian Krakow (Devon Gummersall). The series delves into his agonizing crush on Angela — who basically doesn't know he exists — while also digging into the life of a teenage boy who's not one of the popular kids. It all concludes at a high school dance that's equal parts freeing and heartrending, as Brian pines for Angela, who pines for another, all while an entirely different girl has her heart broken by Brian. Ah, high school. Read more.

2. Best in Show at T/F. True/False Film Festival 2015 has wrapped, and the Columbia Daily Tribune's Asher Gelzer-Govatos has some awards to hand out to this year's films.

Best Breakthrough Film: Khalik Allah, a photographer and director from New York City, has made a few short or smaller documentaries before but “Field Niggas” is his breakthrough work, clocking in at just longer than an hour. It carries the weight of a film twice that long, though, and signals Allah as an aesthetic force to watch. He weaves the faces of people on one street corner in Harlem with the sounds of their voices, thrown out of sync. The result is a hypnotic piece of filmmaking that undermines stereotypical portrayals of poverty and argues for the recognition of human dignity. Read more.

3. The Fight for Diversity on TV. The Native American storyline on "The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt" has been controversial. Alyssa Rosenberg of The Washington Post tries to weigh Tina Fey and company's defense with the criticisms.

But Hill’s critique raises an important question for people who want to advocate for diversity in television. On the face of it, Fey and Carlock have done exactly what they were supposed to. They hired people of color to write on their show, and rather than set them to writing exclusively white characters, they changed the show to provide more outlets for their staff’s expertise and life experiences. Read more.

4. Shadow of a Doubt. The new documentary "Merchants of Doubt" looks at how scientific knowledge like climate change can be denied. Anthony Kaufman of Science and Film spoke with Richard B. Rood, the professor of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Michigan about the political argument behind it.

SSF: Is there any data anywhere that suggests that global temperatures, on average, have not increased over the last 100 years?

RR: No, there is no credible data that suggests that global temperatures have not increased. If you look at the observations of surface data — and when we’re talking about global warming, we’re talking about surface temperature, including ocean and ice—all of the evidence is of a warming planet. If you look at just air temperature, which is not really the best individual measure to look at because there’s more variability, you’ll see it jumping up and down. But all of the evidence is that the planet has been warming for the last 150 years. And the last 30 years, I’d argue, is taking place at a rate that is accelerating faster compared with the previous 100 years.

SSF: The hypocrisy of the climate change deniers is very funny, because first, they’ll say, there’s no warming. And then they’ll say, okay, if there’s warming, it’s not bad.

RR: That’s why it’s a political argument as opposed to a knowledge-based argument. Read more.

5. "Empire" as a Blockbuster. Fox's show "Empire" isn't just the blockbuster TV wants, but the one it needs. Grantland's Andy Greenwald writes:

This is why it’s important for all involved to remember the central reason for Empire’s tremendous success: It’s actually great! I’m bewildered by the need I see everywhere to contextualize affection for this show — calling it "ridiculous" or tut-tutting its bizarrely bullish view of the music industry. "Empire" is the rare TV series — be it comedy or drama, network or cable — with complete pitch control. It walks a fine line between glamorous excess and emotional sincerity, and it does it in Cookie’s 6-inch heels without ever wobbling once. Read more.

Tweet of the Day:

"Hey. What if we showed the origin of that thing that doesn't need an origin?" - origin story of the origin story

— Kumail Nanjiani (@kumailn) March 11, 2015

Joshua Oppenheimer's Documentary Manifesto

Sam Adams — Thu, 12 Mar 2015 16:27:11 GMT

Joshua Oppenheimer's appearance at the Based on a True Story conference (BOATS) at the University of Missouri's journalism school wasn't an official keynote address. But his 90-minute interview, conducted by Slate's Dana Stevens, had the force of an aesthetic manifesto, a true vision of what documentaries can do — and what they can't.

Oppenheimer, who also screened his new film, "The Look of Silence" and the director's cut of his 2013 Oscar nominee "The Act of Killing" in Columbia as part of the True/False Film Festival, could be spotted all over town throughout the long weekend, nodding intently as festivalgoers seized their chance to chat up a MacArthur fellow. But given the floor, as he was at BOATS, Oppenheimer responded not with soft-spoken sentences or even paragraphs but whole pages of thoughts, cogent and neatly organized, and deeply fascinating.

Both "Act" and "Look" deal with the Indonesian mass killings of 1965 and '66, when 500,000 people or more were murdered in supposed anti-Communist purges. In "Act," which was released in 2012, the men who carried out the killings were invited to restage them, acting out horrific tableaux in which they are both methodical executioners and screaming victims; in "Look," Adi Rukun, whose brother was murdered during the purges, confronts the killers himself, often while performing his duties as a traveling optometrist.

READ MORE: 'The Act of Killing' Director on Dreams, Recognition and Impact

Oppenheimer's methods were born of practical necessity: Filming survivors old enough to remember the purges firsthand would have placed them in grave danger, since the perpetrators and their political heirs have held sway Indonesia ever since. So instead, Oppenheimer found a way to film their absence, to make visible the country's decades-long denial. The film have served the function of conventional activist documentaries, opening a long-overdue dialogue in Indonesia itself and directing attention to the survivors. "Look's" Adi was also selected as the recipient of True/False's True Life Fund, which provides money to documentary subjects.

Listening to Oppenheimer speak was, in its own way, nearly as overwhelming an experience as watching his films. He's light-years ahead ahead of most of his fellow filmmakers, to say nothing of most people writing on the subject, in his understanding of the nature and purpose of nonfiction film, the inaccessibility of the historical past, and the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of conventional human-rights documentaries. Oppenheimer's talk is now available in its entirety here, but we've culled some of the aspects which focus on his philosophy of documentary filmmaking below. His answers have been edited and condensed.

To protect the safety of his subjects, Oppenheimer shot both "The Act of Killing" and "The Look of Silence" before "Act" was released.

The two films, which Oppenheimer calls "companion pieces," were conceived around the same time, although he worked on them separately. The earliest footage in "Look," in which two perpetrators of the Indonesian genocide reminisce about killing a man named Ramli, whose death became almost synonymous with the genocide in the surrounding area. From 2005-2010, Oppenheimer worked exclusively what would become "Act," and edited it for the next two years. After that, in the spring of 2012, he returned to "Look." As those who ordered and carried out the killings are still in power, Adi put himself at risk, so part of the film's budget went to relocating him and his family before either "Act" or "Look" was screened in public.

Oppenheimer doesn't make films about history. He makes films about the present.

Although both "The Act of Killing" and "The Look of Silence" work to uncover the brutal legacy of the 1965 genocide, Oppenheimer is careful to specify that they are not movies about the past. Although he admits to using the word himself early on, he now avoids calling the scenes in "Act" where the genocide's perpetrators take on the roles of killers and victims "reenactments," preferring to use "dramatization" instead.

"It wasn't that I was getting information about what happened," he said. "What we're seeing is dramatization of the present-day fantasies, scripts, stories that the perpetrators are telling themselves so that they can live with themselves."

Some of these fantasies are self-glorifying, but others channel the guilt into readymade forms. "They throw themselves into a model of being bad," Oppenheimer explained, following a kind of film noir scenario that is "at least intelligible and inhabitable."

READ MORE: Making a Living as a Documentary Filmmaker is Harder Than Ever

He hates the term "fly-on-the-wall."

"In so-called 'fly-on-the-wall' documentary, there's a claim that the camera is a transparent window onto a pre-existing reality. But what really is happening is that the director and the film crew and the subjects are collaborating to simulate a reality in which they pretend the camera is not present. It's a kind of dishonest story about how the film was made that performs a useful function — namely it helps us to suspend our disbelief and perceive that simulation as reality," he said.

"People who would have us believe that the masterpieces of direct cinema — and to be sure, there are masterpieces of direct cinema — would ask us to believe that if the camera is there long enough, the mother and the child will forget that the camera crew will behave as though it's not there. That's absurd. That's just idiocy. No one forgets the presence of the camera, no matter how long it's there. All documentaries are performance. They are performance precisely where people are playing themselves," said Oppenheimer.

He continued, "If we throw away the myth of fly-on-the-wall and ask what is a more helpful understanding of what's happening in documentary film when it really soars, when it's really explosive, when it's really wonderful, what's happening is a situation within the overall safe space of the filmmaking process, and the efforts that are taken to protect the safety of people when a film is released, within that overall framework, scenes are set up that cut to the core of what the most important issues are in the film in which everybody — filmmaker, participant, crew – is pushed beyond their comfort zone and things are allowed to spiral somewhat out of control. That's when documentary film becomes genuinely cinematic. Until that happens, it's mere simulation."

There are no heroes or happy endings.

He explained: "Far too many documentaries dealing with atrocity approach the atrocity either through a campaigner or a hero who you feel is, even if they're not succeeding in the film, at least they're fighting the good fight on our behalf. It's a way of creating a less overwhelming position for the viewer, and I think it fundamentally doesn't serve any understanding of the atrocity. It fundamentally serves to make the experience easier for the viewer, so that when we leave the cinema, we feel like, 'We, somebody out there is fighting the good fight. The future is in good hands. And maybe by my watching the film, that person in their struggle is strengthened.' Maybe there's a website where you can sign a petition of make a donation and go on with your life."

These films are about the present.

"I understood 'The Act of Killing' and 'The Look of Silence' as films about the present, that these are not films about a secret, unknown past," said Oppenheimer. "Nothing can can bring back the dead who were killed in the genocide, but at the same time, nothing can make whole the lives that have been destroyed by fear and silence. Nothing can restore the decades lost to fear. I felt very strongly that 'The Look of Silence,' should be a kind of poem made in memoriam to all that's destroyed, not just through killing but through the impunity that continues to exist in the present. No matter what good might come of these two films, nothing can restore all that's been lost."

One of "The Look of Silence's" most important scenes was shot by someone else.

"The Look of Silence" climaxes with a troubling scene in which Adi's father, over 100 years old and in the grip of advanced Alzheimer's disease, crawls around his own house in terror, unable to remember who or where he is. It's the only scene in the movie that Adi shot himself, as Oppenheimer explained:

"When Adi said he wanted to [take part in the film,] I said, 'No, it's too dangerous.' Then he pulled out a camera that I had given him two years earlier to use as a kind of notebook, to look for images that would be powerful metaphors for the film we would go on to make after I finished 'The Act of Killing.' He took out a tape — he'd given me all the others — and he said, 'I didn't give this to you because it's so painful, but I want to show you something.' It's a scene right at the end of the film where he father is crawling around his own house, lost, demented, no longer able to remember where he is. He calling for help, and Adi's not really helping him. He's behind the camera. I said, 'Why don't you help him?' and Adi said, 'I tried to help him all day.' His wife and children had spent the whole day trying to help him, but because he didn't know them, it just made him more afraid.

Adi said, 'At some point, I felt that the most loving thing I could do was to bear witness to this moment. It's the kind of thing that could never be repeated. It could never be staged. I said, 'Yes, but what does it mean to you?' He said, 'For me, it's like my father's trapped in a prison of fear, and he'll never get out of it because he can't remember the events that caused it.' He can't even remember the son whose murder led him to this trauma. It's like he's in a prison cell and can't even find the door anymore, let alone the key. 'He'll die in this prison of fear, and I don't want my children to inherit this prison.'"

Consent forms are a charade.

Later, Oppenheimer was asked about issues of consent, and whether he considered leaving the scene out of the film entirely.

"I don't think I ever debated about whether or not the scene should be in the film, because the way it was presented to me was like my pole star making the film. The whole film should be constructed so that scene, for some significant portion of the audience, works and is moving at the end, and that there's enough love and safety around that family that even if viewers wonder, 'Why aren't they helping him?' they figure, 'Well, there must be an answer. I just don't know it,' which is how many things in films or not. It wasn't a matter of should I include this or not. It was a matter of this whole film is constructed for that moment. There are people who don't like it, but I also think that's a sign that it's good."

He went on to explain that he took his cues from Adi's father, who was an enthusiastic proponent of the film in its early stages, and from Adi's family, who never expressed any reservations about what he was filming. "Of course," Oppenheimer admitted, "he never signed a consent form, but then, I think consent forms are basically a fraud, for a lawyer. If the film is worth making, no one knows where it's going. You can get them to sign a form as soon as they're in a scene, but they don't know how the footage is going to be used. It's a charade that we go through for lawyers and insurance.

READ MORE: Michael Moore's 13 Rules for Making Documentary Films

The True/False Film Festival Feeds the Hunger for Great Documentaries, and People to Watch Them With

Sam Adams — Tue, 10 Mar 2015 21:22:04 GMT

At Deadspin, Tim Grierson last week, Tim Grierson offered a preamble to what he calls "our best little film festival": Columbia, Missouri's True/False.

True/False presents a welcome alternative to the idea of what a film festival is "supposed" to be. Naturally, that approach opens the door to criticism that this is merely a chummy, touchy-feely festival that overstates its own importance. (Or, as a colleague who has never attended told me warily after hearing my enthusiasm, "So, I see you've drank the Kool-Aid.") Anything handmade and personally curated that tries to do things differently will raise such suspicions. But as someone who dislikes cliques and smug self-satisfaction — especially among film critics — I've been on high alert in regards to True/False since my first trip in 2013. And I just don't see it.

True/False, which I, like Grierson, have been attending since 2013, sits in a sweet spot between premiere-driven international festivals like Toronto, Cannes, and Sundance and so-called "regional" festivals, which typically focus on funneling the movies unveiled at the big-time fests to enthusiastic local audiences. It's easy to scoff at the latter, with their sometimes strained claims at microexclusivity — "Central Northeast Iowa Premiere!" — but at their best, they encourage and sustain the kind of homegrown curiosity a film scene needs to thrive. The big festivals send movies out into the world; regional festivals create audiences to receive them.

True/False has outgrown its regional status — ticket sales this year were over 45,000, more than 10 times the total for their inaugural 2004 edition — but it doesn't have the clout of the majors; you can only draw so much attention to central Missouri in March. But co-conspirators (their official title) David Wilson and Paul Sturtz, along with programmer Chris Boeckmann and the rest of True/False's dedicated and friendly staff, have turned that apparent weakness into a strength. Rather than scramble for premieres, they select from other festivals, choosing not only the best films, but a group that puts forward a particular, if not restrictive, vision of what documentary can be.. I tend to break out in hives upon hearing the word "curated," but this is one case where it truly fits. (They also game the system ever so slightly through the use of color-coded "secret screenings," which allows them to show a small handful of films before their official premieres at other festivals, but that veil of secrecy doesn't extend to the festival itself. You're free to discuss the movies with anyone you want, but what happens in CoMo stays in CoMo.)

Where documentaries are concerned, the matter of premiere status is often something of a non-issue. This year, as every year I've attended, a good chunk of the lineup debuted at Sundance — somewhere between a quarter and a third, depending on how you count. Some movies premiered at Toronto, some at the New York Film Festival, some in Chicago; Khalik Allah's "Field Niggas," a poetic document of Harlem street life, was available for free on YouTube. But for every movie like Alex Gibney's "Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief," making one of its final festival pit stops before its March 23 debut on HBO, there was a movie like "Rules of the Game," a portrait of young French job-seekers, that had barely made a blip since its Cannes premiere last May. At a more hectic festival, one where everyone seems to end up chasing the same small handful of "buzz" titles, I probably wouldn't have made time for "Almost There," in which two filmmakers try to save an elderly outsider artist from his life of squalor and wind up causing as many problems as they solve; it ended up being one of the best things I saw.

Daily Reads: 'The Hunt for Red October' at 25, a Day at a Porn Film Festival and More

Max O'Connell — Fri, 06 Mar 2015 15:56:24 GMT

Criticwire's Daily Reads brings today's essential news stories and critical pieces to you.

1. Hollywood and Actors in "Maps to the Stars. "Maps to the Stars" isn't the freshest take on Hollywood, but for all of its stereotypical moments it offers profound looks at actors. Richard Brody of The New Yorker writes:

That’s where Cronenberg achieves the height of his art—as a director of the body. The best moments in “Maps” present acting as a business of the body, involving care of the body, toning the body—not just through plastic surgery, exercise, and makeup but also through the invocation of the body, the spiritualization of the body, the emotionalization of the body. Cronenberg films actors pushing through beauty and shape toward expressivity, pliability, vulnerability without damage—exposure minimizing pain, inner exertion, and recovery; like athletes, but with the added element of subjectivity, of self-revelation. Read more.

2. Civil Discourse and "The Newsroom." Aaron Sorkin's "The Newsroom" sought to civilize civil discourse, and it often fell short by reducing "discourse" to smug speeches. But Alissa Wilkinson of Biola University's The Table thinks that there was something admirably Quixotic about the show.

The phrase “tilting at windmills” generally stands in for attacking an imagined enemy, which becomes interesting when applied to the "News Night" team, who find over and over that the people they considered their enemies—Reese Lansing, the network president; gossip columnists; reticent informants; competing anchors—are sometimes their friends. The show falls down on digital media entirely (Sorkin is not a fan of the Internet, and lets all new media journalists have it with a horsewhip), and characters seem wrongheaded in the midst of sometimes-smug speeches. At the end of the novel, Don Quixote awakes from his madness and declares it such, and later dies. And yet, it appears he's converted Sancho Panza to the belief in chivalry. The end of the show revisits the Don Quixote metaphor, revealing who the real knight was—who also seems to have lost his mind near the end of the show—and recasts his story as a tragedy that nonetheless seems to have brought about some good. Read more.

3. "The Hunt for Red October" at 25. John McTiernan's adaptation of "The Hunt for Red October" is one of the best action movies of the 90s, in part because it's driven by smart characters figuring things out. Danny Bowes of RogerEbert.com explains:

The way which [Ryan] reverse-engineers Ramius' plot to steal the submarine and defect is as edge-of-the-seat thrilling as any agglomeration of chase-and-battle scenes could be, to say nothing of the clarity of thought necessary to punch through the fearful, knee-jerk assumption all the Joint Chiefs of Staff make that Ramius plans to nuke the U.S. east coast. Ryan listens, a very important and oft-overlooked aspect of being a smart person, when an admiral (Fred Dalton Thompson; “The Hunt For Red October” is packed with terrific character actors) reminds him “Russians don't take a dump, son, without a plan,” leading Ryan to realize that Ramius must have already figured out how he was going to get his crew, who were not in on the defection plan, off the submarine, at which point the solution presents itself almost immediately. Even the moment of desperation in which Ryan relies on luck to convince the American sub captain (Scott Glenn) on Red October's trail not to blow it out of the water, the persuasion he fabricates is ingeniously built (“Has he made any Crazy Ivans [sudden turns to sniff out pursuers]?” “What difference does that make?” “Because his next one will be to starboard.” “Why, because his last was to port?” “No, because he always goes to starboard in the bottom half of the hour.”) That kind of mathematical precision in creating a piece of luck when he desperately needs it is genuinely thrilling to behold. Read more.

4. Hollywood Diversity? Shows like "Empire" and "Fresh Off the Boat" suggest that Hollywood is becoming increasingly diverse, but Alyssa Rosenberg of The Washington Post says that looks can be deceiving.

During the same season that “Scandal” was helping to consolidate Shonda Rhimes’s dominance of Thursday nights at ABC, the percentage of television writing staff jobs held by women was falling from 30.5 percent in 2011 and 2012 to 29 percent. That’s more than the 26.8 percent of the staff jobs women occupied in 2001, but it’s hardly sign of a major revolution. Similarly, the percentage of writing jobs held by people of color fell 1.9 percent from one survey to the next, down to 13.7 percent. Rhimes’s rise as a mogul is important. But it’s not a proxy for the overall diversity of the industry. Read more.

5. The Greatness of True/False. Great as it is seeing a number of new films in a row, film festivals can be exhausting. Tim Grierson of The Concourse writes about why True/False is an exception.

True/False operates like a lot of regional film festivals in that it caters to an audience that doesn't have the time or financial resources to trek over to Cannes or Toronto or Venice to see all the buzzworthy movies. Instead, True/False brings those titles to Midwestern moviegoers in the heart of a college town brimming with life. The festival's demographics hit me where I live: I grew up about four hours east of Columbia, and I feel like I know these people on a molecular level. Unpretentious, curious, willing to give an unknown movie a chance sight unseen, these crowds are my type of film audience. (I'm sure it helps that the theaters aren't filled with people who work in the business.) As much as I love the energy and rush of, say, Toronto, it is awfully nice to be at a festival where no one's talking about a film's Oscar chances three seconds after it finishes screening. Read more.

6. A Day at a Porn Film Festival. David Ehrlich of Little White Lies, though, probably had the most unique festival experience. He reports from the first-ever New York Porn Film Festival.

4:40pm: The first short is called "For Supper." The logline is “A boy in a bathroom meets an S&M piss freak.” But that description proves to be a bit misleading. Basically, the film cuts between fetishistic slow-motion shots of a man’s piss cascading against the rear of a urinal, and someone in bondage gear sensually tonguing the glass door of the bathroom (slurping at the icon that identifies this is a men’s lavatory).

4:42pm: The gender of the licker is hard to discern, partially because so much of their body is obscured by leather, and partially because all of the films at the fest are screened at a resolution that — if 720p is the baseline for low-quality HD — I’d assess as roughly 6p. The crudeness of the image forces a seedy veneer onto everything, so that even the most endearing and candidly sex-positive fare feels like it’s a lost episode of "Videodrome."

4:44pm: The guy is done peeing, now. Read more.

Tweet of the Day:

Never noticed a pot smell @Sethrogen + @evandgoldberg's Sony offices. There was a huge dildo on a shelf, but that was work related.

— Rebecca Keegan (@ThatRebecca) March 4, 2015

True/False Film Festival Announces 2015 Lineup

Zack Sharf — Thu, 12 Feb 2015 00:00:00 GMT

The True/False Film Festival has announced the lineup for its upcoming annual event, which takes place in downtown Columbia, Missouri from March 5-8. Selected from roughly 1,200 submitted and solicited films, the 38 chosen titles reflect the festival's typical focus on the art of non-fiction cinema. Many titles will be making their North American premieres, while others screened earlier this year at Sundance.

The 2015 True/False Festival Lineup includes:
"Something Better to Come"
"Spartacus and Cassandra"
"Rules of the Game"
"Those Who Feel the Fire Burning"
"White Out, Black In"
"Heaven Knows What"
"The Visit"
"Drone"
"(T)error"
"Of Men and War"
"Cartel Land"
"Western"
"Invasion"
"Il Segreto"
"Tea Time"
"Tales of the Grim Sleeper"
"Finders Keepers"
"Meru"
"I Am the People"
"Silvered Water, Syria Self-Portrait"
"Maidan"
"How To Change the World"
"Jeff, Embrace Your Past"
"Almost There"
"What Happened, Miss Simone?"
"Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck"
"Best Of Enemies"
"The Chinese Mayor"
"Probation Time"
"Life According to Ohad"
"Bitter Lake"
"The Measure of All Things"
"Field Niggas"

For more information visit the True/False website.

READ MORE: 5 Reasons Why True/False Sets The Standard For Small Film Festivals

Why True/False Is One of the Most Vital Festivals In America

Paul Dallas — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 16:09:11 GMT

Netflix binges and mobile devices may be devouring ticket sales these days, but if you’re lucky enough to make the pilgrimage to Columbia, Missouri, in late February you’ll find ample evidence that film-going is more alive than ever — it’s just moved west.

Now in its 11th year, the True/False Film Festival — which concluded Sunday in this sleepless Mid-western college town — is the ultimate rejoinder to winter doldrums and existential concerns about the state of film culture. It's hard to find more a more enthusiastic and intrepid audience than the locals — a mix of eager college students and gray-haired locals — who regularly pack the sold-out screenings of this four-day non-fiction showcase.

Lead by co-creators/co-conspirators David Wilson and Paul Sturtz, True/False has evolved in just over a decade from a rough-hewn upstart into a destination festival and arguably one of the most vital and exciting platforms for documentaries in North America. And it's achieved this precisely by sticking to what it does best: making it all fun. I may be echoing many a critic before me, whose inherent skepticism about this festival's reputation melted upon contact with the infectious enthusiasm, but so be it.

Indeed, True/False hits a kind of festival sweet spot, and gives filmmakers, critics and industry professionals a real reason to get excited about documentaries. From its inception, its mission has been to create filmmaker-focused festival steeped in local color that offers world-class programming, innovative live events, and a vibe akin to a raucous music festival.

Back in 2004 when the festival debuted, documentary was still a relatively ghettoized genre. (Coincidentally, it was also the year that "Fahrenheit 9/11" walked off with the Palm d’Or.) For most audiences, documentary still meant either verité or PBS-style talking head narratives. In the decade since, we've witnessed the effects of reality television, social media, video games and YouTube on the practice of documentary filmmaking, and on the idea of "reality" itself in the popular imagination. We're all more sophisticated viewers today, and much more conscious of the apparatus behind image-making and storytelling. True/False, as the name implies, was founded on the belief that we live in a grey zone, and that much of what we see onscreen is, in one way or another, a collusion of fact and faction. It’s a simple enough proposition, but one the feels ever more vital.

While True/False is generally more showcase than premiere festival, its stellar reputation nonetheless attracts the top documentaries in any given year. This year's line-up of 43 features was particularly strong, and included titles fresh from Sundance including "Concerning Violence," "Happy Valley," "Rich Hill," and the four top award winners: "The Green Prince," "20,000 Days on Earth," "E-Team," and "The Overnighters."

Also playing was "Sacro GRA," which took top honors at Venice last year, as well as notable titles from Toronto, including "Manakamana," "Jodorowsky's Dune," and "The Unknown Known." Among the films premiering at the festival were Robert Greene's formally playful hybrid "Actress," Amanda Rose Wilder's "Approaching an Elephant" (an engrossing, immersive portrait of a New Jersey "free school"), and Jessica Oreck's singular "The Vanquishing of the Witch Baba Yaga," a 16mm essay film about Eastern Europe that combines hand-drawn animation, slavic folklore, and mushroom picking. Two fiction films also made the cut this year: Sam Fleichner's "Stand Clear of the Closing Doors" and the closing night film, Richard Linklater's "Boyhood."

The festival continued its tradition of pushing against received notions of documentary by celebrating illusion in filmmaking. The theme of this year’s edition was "Magic Realism," which Sturtz and Wilson said was inspired by a half-remembered cryptic sign in the Missouri countryside and a mid-19th century watchmaker who built a mechanical orange tree that flowered. As they explained it, film — fiction and nonfiction alike — is itself a kind of magic trick: its ability in the hands of a gifted filmmaker to effortlessly convey a sense of palpable reality is alluring, uncanny and worthy of healthy skepticism. All are welcome in documentary.

It was therefore appropriate that the festival's opening night selection was "Jodorowsky's Dune." If ever there was a filmmaker under the spell of magical thinking and capable of conjuring the most elaborate spectacles, it's visionary cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky. This highly entertaining, if didactic, film brings to life the story of his failed attempt to realize an outrageously oversized adaptation of the Frank Herbert sci-fi classic. His was a case of blind ambition writ cosmically large. Introducing the screening, Sturtz said, "The movie you’re about to see is about an enormous dreamer, and watching this film made me think about all the people who came together to create this big dream in Columbia," which now boasts some 43,000 attendees (nearly half the town's population) and is made possible by an 800-person network of staff and volunteers.

Whether by trick or association, magic seemed to be everywhere present, even in the most disparate films. Illusion and self-invention, not to mention the desire to escape oneself, are the subject of Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard's portrait of singer/song-writer Nick Cave. "20,000 Days on Earth," which plays like a noir, explores Cave's self-styled persona through a creative mixture of unscripted, partially fictive scenes and intimate recording sessions that evoke Cave's literary world of misfits, outsiders, and darkly comic fatalism.

At the first screening, the filmmakers laughed, saying they had no idea they were making a "documentary," which only furthered the case that their film had landed at the right festival. Themes of self-creation and identity were also integral to Robert Greene's "Actress," a film that resonated with many festivalgoers this year. Once upon a time, Brandy Burre was an actress with a recurring role "The Wire," and gave it all up to raise a family in upstate New York. Greene's film, which documents Burre's return to acting, employs a mix of verité and scripted scenes to suggest that role-playing of one kind or another is always at play in life.

A wholly different but no less compelling idea of magic was on display in Amir Bar-Lev's "Happy Valley," the director's thorough and even-handed examination of the Joe Paterno-Jerry Sandusky cover-up at Penn State. Bar-Lev was the recipient of this year’s True/Vision Award (the festival's only award), and the film played to a packed house in one of its largest venues on the University of Missouri campus (incidentally, the home of Michael Sam, college football’s first openly gay athlete).

"Happy Valley" is ultimately about the subjectivity of historical memory. A potent metaphor running throughout the film is the continual editing of a downtown mural depicting the university's icons. Sandusky is quickly painted out, but Paterno remains a conundrum. The question of whether to preserve a halo painted above the disgraced Paterno reveals the absurdity of America's hero worship and its politics of shame. Bar-Lev brilliantly sums it up in the final aerial shot of the university's sacred stadium, sitting empty, like a clean slate. After showing us the partial restoration of the school's glory, Bar-Lev suggests it may simply be history repeating itself — that all "spectacles are like a conjurer’s trick." We’re all under a spell of one kind or another.

This was especially true — though for very different reasons — for the audience attending the sold-out hometown premiere of "Rich Hill" in the 1,700-seat Missouri Theater. Tacy Droz Trago and Andrew Droz Palermo's exquisitely rendered portrait of three teenage boys living amidst poverty and mental illness in rural Missouri was the closest thing to a consensus film at the festival, and it earned the talented directors and cast members a rousing standing ovation. The film's charismatic subjects possess self-awareness well beyond their years and the filmmakers' smartest move was to simply be there to watch and listen. The intimacy is startling, as are the physical and emotional conditions of boys' lives, which are never treated in a manner that is anything less than compassionate.

The screening was also a reminder of what makes True/False so special — its conviction that film is above all a social art best experienced together. Every aspect of the festival's production testifies to a community ethos that is as scrappy as it is professional. But True/False would not be what it is today without the wildly imaginative events that happen around the screenings: the art installations, the buskers playing at screening, the opening night Jubilee masquerade gala, the March March parade which features handmade costumes (including oversized puppets of Sturtz and Wilson, much to their surprise), and the numerous late-night dance parties. One of the most popular and raucous is "Gimme Truth," a “documentary game show” held in the Vimeo Theater in which non-professional local filmmakers attempt to stump the festival's filmmaker guests.

True/False matters in today's overstuffed festival landscape precisely because its success runs counter to the conventional wisdom about what constitutes a film festival’s relevance. Festivals typically become players by courting industry, building a brand and wielding power as cultural gatekeepers. True/False has managed to build its reputation without resorting to typical branding. There are identifiable Sundance and Tribeca docs, but it would be hard to pin down a True/False doc.

If the festival has a brand, it’s expressed in th experience itself. Its allure for filmmakers and industry professionals is that they’ll actually have a good time, which is why people who are not presenting a film also attend. It's not a festival where distribution deals are made, which frees it to focus on cultivating industry connections that actually benefit filmmakers, such as the well-curated SWAMI mentoring program.

The success of True/False is dependent on its location far from film's traditional centers of power, where the organizers have been able to rally the energy and resources of a vibrant college town. The model probably wouldn't work in other places, which is why it's so unique: True/False has established a new locus for film culture, and in the age of the laptop, this is no small feat.

True/False Review: Robert Greene's Mesmerizing 'Actress' Features a Disgruntled Actress-Turned-Housewife Facing Life After 'The Wire'

Eric Kohn — Thu, 27 Feb 2014 21:04:21 GMT

"Brandy Burre is Actress," reads the opening credit of Robert Greene’s aptly titled documentary "Actress," setting the stage for a movie wholly consumed by that single, hypnotizing presence. A once-promising thespian who abandoned a role on HBO’s “The Wire” to start a family in upstate New York, Burre invites a tantalizing mixture of fascination and pity. Less nonfiction portrait than a poetic framing of domestic frustrations, "Actress" is about a lot more than flailing show business aspirations.

On the surface, Burre's hardships aren't unique; it's swiftly established that she abandoned her profession to take care of her children. But Greene -- whose lyrical focus on alienated lives included "Fake It So Real" (amateur wrestlers) and "Kati With an I" (a Southern teen faces the onset of adulthood) -- makes it clear that Burre faces a perilous identity crisis. First seen with her back to the camera and facing a sea of dirty dishes, her arm juts out in slo-mo, casually knocking a stray glass to the ground. In voiceover, she says, "I tend to break things."

Viewed alongside Greene’s last two features, "Actress" completes a trilogy of probing looks at performance in real world circumstances. In "Kati With an I," the young star's constant reflections on her limited future belie her insecurities; similarly, the wrestlers' mock aggression in “Fake It So Real” mask the legitimate frustrations that lurk beneath their violent displays. In "Actress," Greene positions his star in the grips of inner turmoil while constantly battling to display self-confidence.

But is she complicit in constructing this duality? Early on, sitting in the playroom of her home in Beacon, New York and surrounded by neatly organized toys, she claims that parenting has become her creative outlet — and then repeats the line again, as if rehearsing the lie she tells herself each day.

In contrast to Burre's ubiquitous soul-searching, her husband remains a phantom-like figure, hovering nearby without explicitly attending her pity parties. Of course, Burre’s constant discussions of her heatless marriage, which culminate with a major development around the middle of the second act, exclusively reflect her perceptions. Her partner isn’t antagonized so much as marginalized. As Burre revisits the possibility of returning to show business, the validity of her earlier efforts gradually come into play.

READ MORE: Gorgeous Hand-Painted Poster for Robert Greene's 'Actress'

Though her complaints occasionally reach a pathetic extreme, the story’s dramatic weight holds: She’s the embodiment of genuine talent squandered by personal hangups and debilitating gender barriers. "I gotta make money with this face," Burre moans, but a dispiriting park bench conversation with an agent suggests that her creative passion runs counter to any entrepreneurial aspirations, and ultimately she’s trapped somewhere in between the two.

Greene fashions a narrative out of Burre’s disarray by capturing her in small asides in between the greater developments in her emerging midlife crisis. She reflects on her mistakes, rehearses and worries over the prospects of new roles, and recounts new developments at each turn. While Greene uses a traditional cinema verite approach, "Actress" feels more like a subjective window into its subject’s troubled consciousness than a naturalistic depiction of her experiences.

Even so, by virtue of Burre’s uneasy state of affairs, the movie delivers a canny look at the ills of the entertainment industry that gives it the presence of a modern day "Sunset Boulevard." With fleeting glimpses of her brief stint on "The Wire," and a dryly funny peek at Burre sifting through paltry royalty checks while her energetic daughter plays nearby, "Actress" presents a sharp contrast between the allure of the spotlight and the dull rhythms that continue once it recedes.

At times, Greene's collage-like approach has an alienating effect, but even as the thread gets lost in a tunnel of fragments, "Actress" maintains an atmospheric focus that takes its cues from Burre’s undulating moods. During one marvelous tangent, she journeys to the city for a gig at downtown piano bar "The Duplex," where she performs a soulful original composition with telling lyrics ("I’ve dealt with fools like you before") that express her inner anguish at the hostile world around her. Such bursts of liveliness form an insightful contrast with Burre’s drab home routine — whether sending her kids off to school before gazing out the window at the falling snow, or rehearsing a new audition from the clutches of her couch, she’s constantly battling the pressures of despair.

Greene, who shot, cut and produced the movie with longtime collaborators Douglas Tirola and Susan Bedusa, tends to create dazzlingly textured experiences (and with his recent editing credit on the Sundance hit "Listen Up Philip," he’s well positioned to gain further recognition for his directing efforts). "Actress" is an ideal illustration of his layered approach, as it presents Burre’s experiences in a masterfully assembled set of sounds and images. Among the most potent of these is a long take of Burre seated on the train, which gradually gains speed until it morphs into a dizzying blur, until Greene counters the movement with a sudden cut to the barren, frozen lake near her isolated home.

In these startling moments, "Actress" goes beyond its focus on the professional woes of its subject to explore her greater hardships in an indifferent world. It’s a story with universal appeal rendered in intimate flourishes. Precisely because of her constant prevarications and slip-ups, she provides the movie with its emotional anchor. By capturing her in a tortured journey to find the ideal performance, "Actress" gives it to her.

Criticwire Grade: A-

HOW WILL IT PLAY? Premiering this week at the True/False Film Festival in Missouri, “Actress” will next play as the closing night entry at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s new “Art of the Real” series in late April. Strong reviews and support from the documentary community should yield a healthy response in limited release.

Exclusive: True/False Surprises With 'Boyhood' As Closing Night Film

Nigel M Smith — Fri, 07 Feb 2014 17:20:59 GMT

Indiewire has exclusively learned that Richard Linklater's hugely anticipated drama "Boyhood" will be closing this year's True/False Film Festival. Filmed over a whopping twelve years, "Boyhood" follows a boy and his parents as they grow together as a unit. Ethan Hawke and Patricia Arquette star.

"Boyhood," a narrative drama, is a surprising choice to close a festival devoted to nonfiction storytelling. In a statement explaining the selection, True/False stated:

"Although 'Boyhood' is clearly a work of fiction, the intricacies and challenges Linklater and team faced in producing situate it more in the company of nonfiction films, where production timelines are measure more often in years than in the weeks of conventional fiction filmmaking.
"For most casual filmgoers, the role of the producer may be mysterious, in part because their efforts are designed to be invisible onscreen. But a film like 'Boyhood,' seamless as a viewing experience, also demands that we acknowledge the epic care and attention to detail than went into its creation. What's more, Linklater's artistic process, by necessity, took into account the natural meanderings of his actor's lives, lending a verisimilitude to the action missing from many other fiction films."

The film will play on Sunday, March 2 at Jesse Hall in downtown Columbia, Missouri. IFC Films is handling the theatrical release of the drama.

The True/False Film Fest runs Feb. 27 to Match 2. Go here for the full lineup.

2014 True/False Film Fest Lineup Announced

Max O'Connell — Thu, 06 Feb 2014 15:56:13 GMT

From its 2004 inception, True/False Film Fest has turned into one of the most prestigious documentary focused film festivals in the world. The lineup for 2014's Festival was announced Wednesday evening, and it's filled with a number of favorites from Sundance ("Happy Valley," "Rich Hill"), Toronto ("The Unknown Known," "Jodorowsky's Dune," "Manakamana"), and more.

Among the more notable titles are a number of Sundance award-winners: World Documentary Audience Award-winner "The Green Prince," World Cinema directing and editing-winner "20,000 Days on Earth," U.S. Documentary cinematography-winner "E-Team", and "The Overnighters," which won a Special Jury Award for Intuitive Filmmaking.

Other highlights include the 2007 documentary favorite "My Kid Could Paint That" and Richard Linklater's "Boyhood," a non-documentary, but one with a certain level of fascination for True/False given the similarities to Michael Apted's "Up" series. The festival will also hold a number of secret screenings, as per usual.

The full lineup is below:

20,000 Days on Earth
Actress
Approaching the Elephant
Big Men
Boyhood
Bronx Obama
Cairo Drive
Captivated: The Trials of Pamela Smart
Concerning Violence
Demonstration
Dusty Stacks of Mom
E-Team
Forest of the Dancing Spirits
The Green Prince
Happy Valley
Jodorowsky's Dune
The Joycean Society
Killing Time
Kingdom, If I Can (shorts)
Kith & Kin (shorts)
Life After Death
Manakamana
Miraculous Tales
My Kid Could Paint That
The Notorious Mr. Bout
The Overnighters
Particle Fever
Private Violence
Rich Hill
Sacro GRA
Secret Screening Amber
Secret Screening Burgundy
Secret Screening Cyan
Secret Screening Orchid
Stand Clear of the Closing Doors
Stop Over (L'Escale)
A Thousand Suns (Mille Soleils)
Tim's Vermeer
Ukraine is Not a Brothel
Uncertain (work-in-progress)
The Unknown Known
Vanishing Point (shorts)

Exclusive: 'The Wire' Alum Brandy Burre Relaunches Her Career in a Fascinating Teaser for Documentary 'Actress'

Eric Eidelstein — Wed, 05 Feb 2014 21:07:00 GMT

Actress Brandy Burre captivated audiences as campaign fixer Theresa D'Agostino in seasons three and four of HBO's "The Wire." The upcoming film "Actress," directed by Robert Greene, whose 2012 "Fake It So Real" was named one of the best documentaries of 2012 by Roger Ebert, explores Burre's hiatus from acting for motherhood and her current efforts to revitalize her career.

Greene, who describes "Actress" as a "nonfiction/melodrama hybrid," initially wanted to explore the role performance could have in a documentary film. "I thought it would be an interesting experiment to make a documentary about a person that, as an actor, couldn’t help but perform when the camera was on her," he explained. Burre, who is Greene's real life next-door neighbor, happened to be the ideal subject.

"Actress" will have its world premiere at the True/False Festival starting Feb. 27 and will close the Art of the Real series at Lincoln Center in April. This closing will also mark its New York premiere.

Check out an exclusive teaser clip from "Actress" below: