True/False Film Festival

FESTIVALS: True/False 2012, Day Four: Destroy Your Safe and Happy Lives

Christianne Benedict — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 19:11:59 GMT

The movies I saw on the last day of True/False continued to intersect with the other movies I've seen this weekend. The festival taken as a whole functions as a kind of mosaic, in which the individual pieces add up to a larger whole. This is the first year I've really noticed this, even though I'm sure that past festivals have been similarly constructed. I just never saw enough movies in past years to get the full effect. I saw thirteen movies this year, counting Secret Screenings. My second favorite film of the festival was secret. So was the lone film I didn't really like. It's probably just as well that I don't get to write about that one.

The three films I saw on Sunday were Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, 1/2 Revolution, and The Imposter. Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry circles around the same issues of art one finds in Maria Abramovic: The Artist Is Present, the same activism as 1/2 Revolution and How to Survive a Plague, and the same daredevil tweaking of corrupt power structures as The Ambassador. 1/2 Revolution has the same humanizing impulse toward Islam as Building Babel, the same sense of the subject as the creators of the film as How to Survive a Plague, and the same opposition to corrupt power as Ai Weiwei and The Ambassador. The Imposter has the same fuzzy relationship with "truth" as any number of films in the festival. It's appropriate, then, that The Imposter was the last film I saw before they started gathering up the chairs and rolling up the carpets.

Ai Weiwei is arguably the most influential living artist anywhere in the world. Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (directed by Alison Klayman) is a catalog of why this is so. Ai is the artist who designed the "birds nest" stadium for the 2008 Olympics then disavowed it when he saw the average people of Beijing driven from their homes to make room for the games. Following the Sichuan Earthquake, Ai made a project of finding the names of all of the schoolchildren who had died in the disaster. The authorities, he suspected, were under-reporting the numbers. At a show in Munich, he arranged hundreds of backpacks on the facade of the Haus der Kunst to spell out "She lived happily for seven years in this world." These kinds of challenges to the state have not gone unnoticed by the Chinese government. Since 2008, Ai has been under constant threat as a dissident. It's a miracle, really, that he's gotten away with as much as he has, but there's a reason for that. Through the viral spread of social media--and Ai is a master at using social media--he's become the highest profile artist in China. To simply get rid of him would be sticky for the government, not that they wouldn't do it.

The first narrative of the film is art. This narrative culminates in the sunflowers installation at the Tate Modern consisting of a hundred million mass produced porcelain sunflowers each individually painted by Chinese workers. It says something about China's role in the global economy at the same time that it celebrates the individuals who work in the system. There's a shot late in the film that would be an ideal end to any other film, in which Ai and his son stand facing each other on the bed of sunflower seeds at opposite sides of the screen. Unfortunately, the film's second narrative supercedes this. It would be a deceitful film if it had ended there.

The second narrative chronicles Ai's relationship with The State, and this is unhappy. He's under constant surveillance, he's cut off from most means of communication outside of China (except, significantly, for Twitter), and he was subjected to a beating by the Chengdu police. This last resulted in a cerebral hemorrhage while he was in Munich. Ai's attempts to redress this form a core part of his activism. It seems incredible to an American eye that Ai would have no redress for wrongs done by the state, but that very invulnerability is something that his work seeks to undo. When the film's screen goes black and a title card appears describing the artist's disappearance, there's a real sense of dread. Ai's arrest lasted 81 days, perhaps prompted by the Arab Spring.

There's a third narrative here, too, one beginning at least as far back as Ai's Black, Gray, and White Cover books. These were the precursors to viral information. You couldn't shop for them. You had to know someone to get them. Ai's online activities are at least as significant as his art and his activism, because it's what has spread his fame. There's a kernel of what political action against entrenched power is going to increasingly look like here, assuming that those forces don't succeed in cutting it all off at the ankles with things like SOPA. If the future isn't going to be a boot to the throat forever, as Orwell once speculated, then social media will be why.

Speaking of the Arab Spring, 1/2 Revolution (directed by Karim El Hakim and Omar Shargawi) throws the viewer into the middle of it. This is a film made by the participants, which means that their film is a ground level view of the events in Cairo in early February, 2011. This film watches the stages unfold, from zeal to optimism to fear to despair. The Egyptians managed to shrug force Hosni Mubarak from office, but they didn't shrug off the structures that kept him in place. Once the military seized absolute power, it became clear that they may have gotten rid of the dictator, but the dictatorship remained. It's a pessimistic film.

The film's directors, Karim and Omar are part of a circle of friends who live in downtown Cairo, and in addition to participating in the marches and demonstrations, they also provide a glimpse of their family lives. This is something that puts a human face on the broader social movement, and they're canny in the way they translate their own personal concerns into a broader context. Their circle isn't a lot different than a boho circle of friends in New York or San Francisco. They're smart, likeable people, and the movie ratchets up the dread because we like them. they're engaging in something profoundly dangerous. The film communicates this with the street level footage of marches that turn into riots. These scenes have a visceral impact. For pure, white-knuckle suspense, this is better than most action films.

Of course, the film is incomplete. The "1/2" in the title should tell you that. The filmmakers ultimately fled for their own safety, and I can't blame them for that. The events in Egypt are still roiling. For that matter, there's precious little context provided for the events on screen, but that's okay. That's the job of another kind of documentary, one with talking heads. But that's not this movie. Extrapolating where this film leads is murky at best, and the future is unwritten anyway, so what the hell, eh?

This was my favorite film of this year's True/False.

The Impostor (directed by Bart Layton) is so utterly absurd that if someone ever decides to adapt it into a fictional feature, no one will believe it. The Impostor tells the unlikely story of a 23 year old Frenchman named Frédéric Bourdin who successfully impersonated a missing teen from San Antonio, Texas. The teen, Nicolas Barclay, disappeared three years prior. Bourdin, it turns out, is a pathological liar whose personal quirks lead him to impersonate minors as a way of putting himself in touch with a childhood he never had. That he got away with it for any length of time, though, well, that's where this story lies. This is a film that has indulges in the Rashomon effect.

The film is up front with Bourdin's deception. Narrating the film's flashback reconstructions of the events, Bourdin himself tells the audience exactly what happened. There's no rug-pulling involved along those lines. What isn't so clear is why Nicolas Barclay's family accepted the deception. Bourdin obviously wasn't Nicolas. The boy had blue eyes, while Bourdin's eyes were brown. Bourdin was dark-haired. Nicolas had blonde. Bourdin spoke with a French accent. Did the Barclays so desperately need to be reunited with Nicolas that could deceive themselves to that extent? Maybe. Two other characters muddy things. Charlie Parker, a private investigator for Hard Copy, sees through Bourdin at once, and suspects him of being some kind of a spy, then begins to wonder at the Barclays motives for not realizing who he is. He decides that something untoward happened to the real Nicolas. FBI Agent Nancy Fisher gets caught up in this idea, too. Nothing concerning Nicolas's disappearance has been resolved. The homicide case opened on the word of Bourdin and Parker remains open a decade later. We're left with a multiplicity of viewpoints, and no firm grasp on what really happened. It's a disturbing movie.

This is a hybrid documentary, in which great whacks of the movie are filmed recreations with actors playing the parts of the principles involved. The real people give their own testimony in separate vignettes. The filmmakers have deliberately stylized the recreations, as if they want to sully the veracity of everything they put on screen. The film is remarkably forthcoming with its facts, too. It scrupulously avoids passing Bourdin off as anything other than a charlatan. It doesn't prejudice the audience toward one point of view or another. That's smart, because the audience might become attached to one or the other characters otherwise and it's important to the film's thesis that this not happen. It manages this well enough, though Charlie Parker is a character right out of the movies, the kind of character that Charles Durning would play in a Hollywood version.

The end of The Impostor is confrontational. Carey Gibson, Nicolas's sister, tells the audience directly what she thinks of Frédéric Bourdin, while Bourdin tells the audience what he thinks of everyone. This last, is a pure portrait of sociopathy. Parker, for his part, ends the film standing on the edge of an open hole where the body of Nicolas Barclay has conspicuously not been found.

And on that note, the True/False Festival came to a close.

Christiane Benedict is a writer and graphic artist who lives in Columbia, Missouri. She blogs at Krell Laboratories.

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

Peter Knegt — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 18:06:47 GMT

The 9th True/False Film Festival concluded yesterday in Columbia, Missouri. Over four days, thousands of folks congregated in Midwestern college town to take in a mix of (mostly) documentaries, innovative social events and -- of course -- the buskers that collectively make True/False such a standout doc fest for locals and visitors alike.

The festival's "co-conspirators" Paul Sturtz and David Wilson met back in 1997 at a concert in Columbia, where Sturtz approached Wilson with the idea of starting a film series.

"I kind of thought nothing of it," Wilson recalled. "People have ideas at bars all the time."

But two days later, Sturtz called him and the film series started the following January. The series went on for five seasons and resulted in the building of the Ragtag Cinema, now Columbia's beloved downtown art house cinema. It also led to Sturtz and Wilson's decision to take their ambition one step further and start a full-on film festival. In 2004, that became a reality with the first True/False Film Festival.

"It was basically a weekend with Friday night," Wilson said. "I feel like the total budget for it was like $60,000. Which seemed like a lot to us at the time. And at that time we'd learned how to get an audience and we'd learned how to put on shows. But I'm fairly certain I will never again work as hard as I worked on the first few years of True/False. Paul and I were working like 18 hours a day... And then we ended up with 4,400 people attending, which felt really great. So we just kept doing it."

Nine years later, True/False has developed into a true gem on the American film festival circuit, with filmmakers, programmers and anyone else lucky enough to make their way to Columbia in awe of the many ways the festival has set itself apart from the others.

"The funny thing is that on one hand our growth has been really fast," Wilson said. "This year, I'm pretty sure we'll have over 35,000 in attendance. But it's also felt really organic. We feel like we've actually moved really slowly. We're always trying out new ideas but we're very careful about expanding the fest."

It seems the vast majority of True/False attendees would agree: If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Wilson and Sturtz have managed to create something really unique and special with the festival, and here's five reasons why:

1. The secret screenings and the non-existent premiere statuses.

Over the course of True/False, seven different films screen under mysterious descriptions headed simply by a color ("secret screening red," "secret screening gold," etc.). The screenings are consistently packed with both people and curiosity, as it's not until the screenings start that audience members discover what they are seeing.

It's a fairly remarkable tradition in that True/False audiences -- especially in the world of Twitter and Facebook -- have wholly kept mum about. They are instructed not to make known what exactly it is they've taken in, which allows the screenings to continue year after year.

The reasoning isn't the gimmick per se, but the fact that otherwise the filmmakers would probably await berths at fests like SXSW, Tribeca or Hot Docs, where premiere status dictates whether or not they can screen there.

"It's a total negotiation and there's a lot of nervousness around it," Wilson said of the screenings. "The festivals we work with that are premiering those films are fantastic to work with it. But they have their concerns, so it's a process. Would it be easier if we didn't have to do it? Yeah. But I'd rather show a great film and have to sort of jump through some hoops then not show it at all"

Wilson recalled that in True/False's first year, they had "Midwest Premieres."

"What we've figured out since is the thing that I'd think every small festival should figure out," he explained. "Which is basically, 'Who cares?' I mean, who cares whether you have a Midwest premiere or a west-of-the-Mississippi premiere. When you're talking about those things, you're making yourself better. You're doing it for the fest, and the fest's prestige, and the fest's ability to do whatever. You're not really doing it for the filmmakers. I think there's a tiny handful of festivals where the premiere status really benefits filmmakers. And when it does, it does. I don't dispute that. There are things about that premiere that are important."

What the secret screenings does offer filmmakers is an opportunity to test drive their films before making their way to festivals where they can potentially get bought.

"Maybe we can offer something to filmmakers that they don't get at their premiere," Wilson said. "That is different and can dovetail with that. I was just talking to a filmmaker with a secret screening here who was talking about the feedback at the screening. He's still tweaking his film. He's got his premiere all set, but he's still tweaking. And he had four minutes to cut, and now he knows what four minutes. That's awesome. That's one of the things we can do. Be a dress rehearsal and let people work out the bugs."

2. The programming.

There's also plenty of non-secret screenings at True/False that are just as worth one's time. The festival's heavily curated program offers the best of bigger festivals like Sundance and IDFA. This year, for example, the likes of Alison Klayman's "Al Weiwei: Never Sorry," Mads Brugger's "The Ambassador," Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady's "Detropia," David France's "How To Survive a Plague," Matthew Aker's "Marina Abramovic: The Artist Is Present," Chris Moukarbel & Valerie Veatch's "Me @ The Zoo," Lauren Greenfield's "The Queen of Versailles" and Malik Bendjelloul's "Searching For Sugar Man."

But there's also some discoveries. A dominant example this year was "Only The Young," the debut film from Elizabeth Mims and Jason Tippet. Screening as a sneak preview, the film follows two high schoolers who are exploring the world of girls and enjoying their loving bromance. A stylized look at the two men's lives that mixes testimonial interviews with with scenic shots of the adventures the friends go on with each other and with their girlfriends, Indiewire interviewed the film's directors here.

3. The lack of industry.

While industry folks certainly attend True/False, it's more for pleasure than business. Numerous folks at this year's edition seemed to go out of their way -- often on their own dime -- to make their way to the festival. Because by avoiding premiere statuses and being any sort of market, True/False provides a sort of safe haven for anyone -- filmmakers, programmers, distributors -- exhausted from the business side of film festivals. Instead, it becomes about the films and about creating a sense of professional community that can sometimes get lost amidst the wheelings and dealings of major festivals.

"Because of our location and because of our attitude, we've cleared this space where we don't have to be an industry-driven event," David Wilson said. "And I feel so lucky to have that space. I don't want Sundance or Tribeca or SXSW or Hot Docs to go away. But it's such a boon to us to say 'You know, here's where you just come and watch movies and just hang out.' I feel lucky. When I talk to other programmers, I get the sense that they are kind of envious of our freedom to maneuver."

4. Innovative event programming.

Beyond the films, there's loads of other events to take in at True/False.

There's the opening jubilee, which encourages one to "put your tux, robot suit, litle black dress or funkiest getup while you masquerade with the rest of the muckety-mucks" at the Missouri Theater. There's the March March, the festival's signature parade of costumes and fire juggling down Ninth Street (check out photos here). There's "Campfire Stories," where filmmakers take the stage around a fake fire at the Odd Fellows Lounge to share stories of "the scene that got away." There's the much-celebrated Gimme Truth! event, which solicits a bunch of short films that may or may not be nonfiction. A panel of filmmakers (this year including Heidi Ewing and Malik Bendjelloul) have to decide whether the clips are true or false. There's even guided tours of Columbia, care of Speed Levitch (the freewheeling raconteur from Bennett Miller's doc "The Cruise").

And then of course, there's the music. Before each and every screening, True/False welcomes musicians to the stage to usher in the screening.

David Wilson explained that it took a while to get that element of the festival right.

"Most musicians don't want to be told that they are going to start playing to an empty room and then as soon as the room is full they have to stop playing," he said. "They don't respond well. But there's this certain kind of musician that really handles that."

Wilson knows that he and his colleagues' role at True/False is to put on a show.

"It's creating an experience that you can't have in front of the computer or at home by yourself," he said. "All of those aspects of it build this group experience and this shared experience. We knew from the beginning: We have to have all the filmmakers, and we have to have music before the shows."

5. Columbia, Missouri.

A college town with a population of just over 100,000, the magic of True/False would not be possible without Columbia, MO itself. From its coffee shops and restaurants to the many historic and/or innovative spaces and environments it offers the festival for its events (only one of which is typically used as a movie theater), Columbia provides a sort of ideal environment for a festival like True/False. And this is mixed with the careful approach to exhibition that Wilson, Sturtz and everyone else at True/False clearly take quite seriously.

Showing in non-traditional venues is a lot of work but we also have a really high standard for presentation," Wilson said. "I think filmmakers appreciate that. It's not really fun as a filmmaker to walk into a room and see a postage-stamp screen and a little projector in the middle of the room. These are people that really care about their images."

"Columbia is also filled with friendly Midwesterners keen on both offering visitors their hospitality and taking in the film festival themselves. There's such a clear pride in the community about the festival, with hundreds of folks on the street donning True/False t-shirts and essentially every business celebrating it via big signs in their windows.

These are also the people that help make it all happen. Wilson and Sturtz work with scores of people willing to make a piece of True/False their own.

"The whole community takes pride in it," Wilson said. "It's really handmade. Somebody has taken care to craft every detail of the fest. The spirit of that kind of bleeds out of the fest. It's a true community effort."

'Only the Young' Filmmakers Elizabeth Mims and Jason Tippet Show Style with Profile of Young Christian Skaters

Bryce J. Renninger — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 17:50:47 GMT

Why They're On Our Radar: In a field of impressive documentary films at this year's True/False Film Festival, crowds were consistently buzzing about a feature debut that debuted in a sneak preview at the festival.

The buzz for Elizabeth Mims and Jason Tippet's "Only the Young" is certainly well-deserved. In "Only the Young," the recently graduated CalArts alums head to Tippet's Southern California hometown of Santa Clarita to document the friendship of two young men, Kevin and Garrison.

The two high schoolers, sincere and naive, are evangelical skateboarders who are exploring the world of girls and enjoying their loving bromance, but none of these attributes dominates the film's depiction of their character or their friendship. The film is a stylized look at the two men's lives - mixing testimonial interviews with with scenic shots of the adventures the friends go on with each other and with their girlfriends.

Mims and Tippet met their producer, Derek Waters (who makes the popular Funny or Die "Drunk History" series, set to be made into a Comedy Central TV series) at Sundance, where they both had films in the same short program. The three sat down with Indiewire to chat about the directing team's first feature.

How has bringing the film to its first festival been?

Jason Tippet: It's been amazing. This is our first feature. We've gone to festivals with shorts, and then, you go and have a good time. This is more nerve racking; you want to know how people are gonna take the film.

Elizabeth Mims: It's just been the three of us watching it. This is so exciting.

Derek Waters: We weren't surprised at the response, but it was nice to see people respond to the film, laugh at the parts we thought were funny.

How did you all decide to work together?

JT: Elizabeth and I made our first short together at CalArts. After we got out, it was nice travelling around the festivals, we won the jury award at SXSW, and we felt it was time to tell a longer story. We met Derek at Sundance. We loved each other's stuff, and we shared a lot of favorite movies in common -- "Billy the Kid," "American Movie." After we got back from Sundance, we met the kids in our film, and we knew we wanted to make this film, and we knew we needed to take the idea around to people to get funding. No one wanted to get on board. Derek asked us how he could help, and we ended up meeting for a dinner that I think I paid for, and we decided to work together.

DW: Yeah! Thanks for the dinner! I love character pieces and documentaries. There's something these two do. This sounds cliche, but they actually take "moving pictures." What they do only amplifies how you're feeling about the characters.

And how did you meet your subjects?

EM: We met them when we were checking out this new skate park, and Garrison came over and asked "Did you lose keys to a Jaguar?" And I said "Do we look like we lost keys to a Jaguar?" Kevin ran up and we watched them interact, and I just thought it was so sweet how they were handling this situation.

JT: When we were at CalArts, we were looking to write a script. I was housesitting in this neighbor's place, and we decided to build something in the yard and we kind of messed up their house. So Elizabeth and I were looking to write that script. But when we were talking to the guys, they started telling us how they lived out of this abandoned house a lot of the time. So we thought, why should we make a narrative feature? We love documentaries where people are capturing things in the moment, following a story where they're not sure where they'll end up, so we did that.

You take a lot of stylistic chances in the film, and they all work. How did you gain the confidence to play with form?

JT: One of the shots i wanted to develop more is the behind the head shots, like from Gus Van Sant's "Elephant." A lot of the times when they were alone - it was a nice shot to go to. It made them look that much more isolated.

EM: We wanted to have a relaxing slowly paced movie. We wanted it to be something you had to work a little bit for, not necessarily exciting at every turn. We didn't move the camera once with our short. We tried to do that with this film, but we were missing so much stuff that we had to do camera movement.

JT: We also had a lot of fun working with our colorist, Loren White, who mostly works in commercials. We played with colors to make each scene different.

How was it documenting a group of kids' last years in high school, a time many of us would never want to look back on?

JT: We wanted to be sensitive to them. They did take a big risk letting people they didn't know as well first start filming them. People can manipulate images and make them look a certain way. We tried to handle it very sensibly. I feel very privileged that they trusted us so much.

DW: Liz and Jason are great filmmakers. Garrison, Kevin and Sky [a third close friend, who both of the boys have feelings (not clearly romantic) for] look up to them, whether they want to admit it or not. Being the subject of a film is awkward at first, but having two filmmakers really like you boosts your confidence.

Showing the kids the film was a great night. I've never been that nervous. Every line matters. It was amplified by hearing Sky breathing. Kevin brought his newest girlfriend along. There's a line that talks about how Sky is a sloppy kisser. Once we all got past that, everything else was okay.

They're way beyond their years. It has something to do with that specific town: you're constantly maturing, but you still want to light off firecrackers and skate off an abandoned house roofs.

FESTIVALS: True/False 2012, Day Three: Strange Intersections

Christianne Benedict — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 16:11:17 GMT

There's a strange sense of connectedness between the films I'm seeing at this year's True/False festival. Whether that's accidental or because of the way True/False is curated, I can't say, but some of the movies I'm seeing seem to be rhymes of other movies. Sometimes it's visual. Sometimes it's thematic. Often, it's both. This year's films seem to be grouped around intersections of race, healthcare, art, queerness, and activism. Having said this, I can't actually support this observation as well as I'd like, because the keystone film that ties all of this together in my own mind is one of those secret screenings I can't talk about. Listening to the buzz around the fest, I get the feeling that more than one of those secret films would supply the glue for this feeling of intersectionality.

I couldn't help but hear Perry White in my head telling Lois Lane that "A good reporter doesn't just report the news, she makes the news while watching The Ambassador, in which director/provocateur Mads Brugger goes undercover as a Liberian diplomat to the Central African Republic. As the film demonstrates, it's relatively easy to get accredited as a diplomat if you have the right shady connections--you can even find these connections on the internet--and there's money to be made from the endeavor. The CAR is a lawless country the size of Texas where the land is rich in natural resources and where the government is so riddled with corruption that it might just as well not exist at all. Brugger himself reminds me of another pop culture figure, too. With his riding boots, sunglasses, and cigarette holder always clenched in his teeth, he does a passable Hunter S. Thompson. An alternate title for this movie might be Fear and Loathing in Bengui.

Brugger's cover has him looking to build a match factory in Bengui (the capital of the CAR), though that's only a ruse. Nobody involved has any illusions that a factory will actually be built, but pretenses must be kept up. The real aim is to get to the trade of conflict diamonds, and this proves deceptively easy. With his hinky documents, Brugger is able to move about in high circles of government in both Liberia and the CAF. The distribution of "envelopes of happiness" containing cash turns out to be a social lubricant of the first order in sub-Saharan Africa, a fact that isn't even a secret. Corruption is like air here. You can't help but breathe it. It's so absurd that when Brugger decides to hire Pygmies for his match factor so he can market their supposed powers as wizards, it's just one more thing.

Brugger's business partner is a man who owns a diamond mine in the disputed "Triangle of Death." He knows a sucker when he sees one, and his first contract with Brugger stipulates that Brugger will pay all of his expenses and upkeep forever. That's some cheek, right there. Brugger also encounters the minister of security, a former Legionnaire turned mercenary who lays out who is behind the CAR's miseries. France, he says, views the CAR as a savings account, and through its proxies it continues to put stones in the CAR's shoes. Resources allocated to put down unrest cannot be used to build infrastructure. This guy is assassinated during the course of the movie. There's an ever present feeling that things could head south for Brugger at any time, and during the second part of the movie, it appears that that's exactly what's happening. His diplomatic papers never show up, his business partner vanishes, and the only friends he appears to have are the Pygmy assistants.

This is as much a movie about Brugger as it is about Africa and corruption, and I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, Brugger himself provides a veneer of absurdity that makes the whole thing watchable. Unvarnished, the corruption and misery on display in this movie might be unbearable. On the other, this is the Heart of Darkness dilemma. By building the movie around a white European and his persona, it runs the risk of using Africa as a backdrop for the problems of white men. I'm all for pointing the finger at Europe and America for the disaster of Africa, but I'd feel more comfortable with The Ambassador wasn't so dependent on its director's personality and ego.

Performance art is as much about the viewer as it is about the artist. Really good performance art engages the viewer in a way that encourages or even forces them to think about their own relationship to art. The audience, as the saying goes, completes the picture. Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present (directed by Matthew Akers) gets around to this point of view eventually, but it dawdles a little in the process. Abramović is reckoned The Grandmother of Performance art. This movie is centered around the creation of a new piece called "The Artist is Present", to premiere at the Museum of Modern Art during a retrospective of her work in which a cadre of younger performance artists recreate the signature pieces from her career. This is a pretty standard arts documentary in which the first part is spent defending the art, the second chronicles the artist's troubled personal life (particularly her relationship with her ex-husband), and the third celebrates whatever new piece the artist is working on at the time. Frankly, the middle part of The Artist is Present sags under this weight.

The Artist is Present is most engaging when it is chronicling the creation and exhibition of Abramović's new piece and when it is showing her work with the younger artists who will recreate her old work. The preparation consists of workshops to train them in the stillness and self-discipline required to perform Abramović's pieces. This is a little New Age-y for my tastes, but the end result on display in the last third of the film is worth the effort. Best of all is watching what "The Artist is Present" does to both Abramović and the participant audience. The premise of "The Artist is Present" is simplicity itself: the artist herself is on display. She sits in a chair for the entire time the museum is open and anyone can sit down opposite her. Abramović then gazes into the eyes of the viewer for as long as the viewer is there. This is a variant of an older piece in which she stood naked before the audience and provided the viewer with a selection of implements (including a revolver) and invited them to do anything to her body they wanted. The newer variant is less hazardous to the artist, but is no less confrontational. There's a famous apocryphal quote by John Ford to the effect that the human face is the most interesting landscape in the world, and The Artist is Present, film and performance both, mines this to devastating effect. The scenes of Abramović gazing into the eyes of her audience are shocking in their intimacy, an effect heightened when the person in the other chair has a some kind of personal relationship to Abramović. One of the sitters is her ex-husband.

Director Matthew Akers comes to the director's chair from the cinematography department and that's all for the good. This is an attractive movie filled with modernist designer spaces. He knows how to film Abramović so that she appears to be a work of art herself, and this is the crux of it: does the artist matter more than the work? No one goes to the Chicago Art Institute just to see Water Lilies. They want to see a Monet. Part of the point of The Artist is Present is to literalize this idea, to put the artist into the space that would ordinarily be reserved for an object rather than an idea.

True/False's annual True Vision Award was presented to Russian filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky. In addition to Kossakovsky's first film, The Belovs, they were also showing his latest, ¡Vivan Las Antipodas!, while lamenting that all of the director's films are unavailable in the USA.

¡Vivan Las Antipodas! is a profoundly disorienting movie for one that is so quiet and so full of mundane life. This is an example of the documentary as tone poem rather than a message-laden agit prop. It's beautifully filmed at eight different spots on the globe. The only thing each location has in common is that it's an antipode to another spot. Antipodes are diametrically opposite spots on a sphere, hence each location is paired with another in the structure of the film. Patagonia is opposite Shanghai, Hawaii is opposite Botswana, Chile is opposite Lake Baikal, Spain is opposite New Zealand. The filmmakers do not give equal weight to these locations. Kossakovsky's camera turns again and again to Patagonia, where he's found an interesting human story rather than an epic landscape, as two bridge keepers offer a dry commentary as a flood wipes away their living. These two guys function as a kind of Greek chorus for the film. In contrast, the only heavily populated area in the film is Shanghai, and the scenes here are strangely impersonal in spite of the press of humanity. The other locations provide epic landscapes and minimal human stories, though the shepherd in Chile who greets all of his sheep by name and whose house is overrun by cats suggests such a story, as does the woman living with her daughter near Lake Baikal. These tend to be small concerns compared to the environments in which they live.

I mentioned that this is a disorienting movie, and so it is. Kossakovsky often turns his camera upside down for long periods, suggesting that the Earth has a bottom on its other side. This makes for strange imagery. It turns a highway in Shanghai at rush hour into an alien landscape that looks as if it were made in a computer. There are also long shots when the camera is on its side. It treats the planet as a shape where the concept of "up" in relation to gravity is only a matter of perception. Many of these shots are composited with reflections on water that turn out to be from their antipodes. It's artfully composed. It takes some patience to sit through it, though, because it requires a perceptual adjustment, not unlike adjusting to 3-D. It's a film that will lose a great deal of its impact on a small screen, unfortunately.

How to Survive a Plague (directed by David France) chronicles the AIDS epidemic from the point of view of ACT UP, whose activism forced dramatic changes in the way drugs are researched and in how medicine interacts with patients. It's also an abject lesson in how putting a gun to someone's head is an amazing motivation. ACT UP existed underneath a Sword of Damocles, and the movie shows the attrition of its members over time. It's a tragic progression, but the film itself has a happy ending of sorts. ACT UP and it's successor, TAG, did succeed in forcing a breakthrough in the end, but even in the midst of celebrating, there's a cautionary note struck. The survivors place a lot of blame on Ronald Reagan and George Bush for foot-dragging. How many millions of people might have been saved had AIDS not been stigmatized as a "gay disease" and as a moral judgement? What can you do in the face of a government that regards your community as essentially disposable. It's a bitter memory.

There's another cautionary note, too, in so far as AIDS is still killing 2 million people a year, which is as many as it was killing at the height of the epidemic. Given that there are effective treatments, this is an appalling number. AIDS activism is no longer a matter of finding a "cure", though that research is still ongoing, so much as it's a matter of forcing access to those treatments.

As an emotional experience, How to Survive a Plague is heartbreaking. It's all such a waste. It's a particularly hard film to watch if one knows anyone who has died AIDS (I do), though this may amplify the catharsis at the end, but anyone can see the tragedy of the bright people on the screen getting sicker and sicker and then dying young.

The media largely ignored AIDS activism at the time this film is set, so the footage in How to Survive a Plague was largely shot by the people in the film. In any gathering shown in the film, you see cameras in the background. The AIDS epidemic was born at the same time as the camcorder, after all, so there's a document where otherwise there wouldn't be, and the task of making the film was a matter of finding this footage. There are more than 30 credited cinematographers. This is a minor theme with some of the films at this year's True/False. Several films were shot by their subjects rather than by a traditional documentary crew, and these films have an immediacy that is absent from other entries at the fest.

Christiane Benedict is a writer and graphic artist who lives in Columbia, Missouri. She blogs at Krell Laboratories.

FESTIVALS - True/False 2012, Day Two: The Influence Machine

Christianne Benedict — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 15:10:13 GMT

"The thing is, directors and studios don't really like each other." Graphic designer Erik Buckham ought to know. He has a ringside seat. He designs movie posters. The nature of the business means that he deals with both studio marketing departments and control freak directors, but not always in equal measure. This comment explains a lot about why American movies look the way they do and a lot about why Buckham prefers to work on small films rather than big.

If you don't know Buckham's name, you probably know his work. His most famous poster is probably the "You don't get to 500 million friends..." poster for The Social Network. True/False asked him to design their poster and graphics this year and brought him to the festival to speak about what he does. He brought a slideshow of his past work, including multiple variations that never made the cut, as well as pieces that show the evolution of the concepts that make up his final work.

The process of making the True/False graphics was the centerpiece of the talk, and it showcased the evolution of image from concept to final product. The theme of this year's True/False festival, both in its visual presentation and in the various artworks scattered around the venues, is film as an "Influence Machine," and the final result progressed from fairly abstract, illustration-y images to a steampunk Van de Graaf generator, cobbled together in the poster art as a photo collage, and in real life as a huge sculpture in the lobby of the Missouri Theater. It also features in the arresting bumper reels that play at the beginning of each film.

Friday is when True/False transforms into a kind of arts carnival. Most of the shows have opening acts of busking musicians who pass a hat around the audience. I wish there were a greater diversity of musicians and musical styles beyond the kind of 1990s-ish indie folk rock that dominates the fest, but not enough to grouse overly much. The Friday parade up at the Boone County courthouse seems like a combination of open-air rave and homecoming celebration, complete with marching band. And, as I mentioned, there's art scattered across the various venues. All of this gives True/False its flavor.

The opening scenes of Building Babel (directed by David Osit) are a study in contrasts. First, we see the huge twin spotlights that mark the site of the World Trade Center. On the soundtrack are the phone messages directed at Sharif el-Gamal, the man behind the Park 51 Islamic Community Center--popularly misidentified as the "Ground Zero Mosque". The messages are a mixture of invective and nativist bigotry. To the callers, el-Gamal is an Islamic invader. The scene then switches to el-Gamal's home life as he gets his daughters ready for school. The man we meet in this scene is an American, born and bred in Brooklyn to a Catholic mother and a Muslim father. In his demeanor and his speech, he's a New Yorker, not different in any significant way from a devout New York Jew or New York Catholic. Therein lies the thesis of the movie. It wants to paint a broader picture of what it means to be an American, a picture that includes people like el-Gamal and his family. It wants to be a rebuke to nativism.

The movie's ostensible narrative finds el-Gamal and his team fending off an attempt to get the old Burlington Coat Factory where he's set up shop as a landmark building. There's nothing particularly notable about the building except its proximity to the World Trade Center. A piece of airplane wreckage fell on it on 9/11. Making it a landmark would prevent el-Gamal from remodeling the property. At the time, the building was in a state of dereliction, so it would unintentionally freeze it as a derelict, which seems antithetical to the idea of a landmark. Al-Gamal's team (rightly) argue that being in the path of a disaster isn't enough to make it a landmark. Does the guard rail that James Dean drove through on his way to his death qualify as a landmark? Most sensible people would say no, and the landmark commission turns out to be unanimously sensible.

In some respects, the community center and the uproar around it is beside the point. The film gives it lip service--it can't avoid it--but it expends more energy painting Sharif and his family as an all-American family, just like any other American family, and it's largely successful at this. It doesn't deal with a fundamental problem in its thesis, though: why does it matter? If he is otherwise law-abiding, if he is otherwise a good citizen, what does it matter if he is totally assimilated or not? This is always the problems of a minority living within a majority, and the absence of a discussion of this is an elephant standing in the room. The movie works better as a character study of el-Gamal himself. It shows him warts and all. He's obviously an affable guy. He loves his kids and his wife, Rebecca (who is almost an equal partner in the film's attentions). He's a businessman who has bitten off a project for which he's totally unprepared. Still, he's perpetually optimistic, and that makes him archetypically American.

Building Babel was preceded by "Paraiso" (directed by Nadav Kurtz), a short film about skyscraper window washers in Chicago. I liked it better than the feature. Apart from the vertiginous locations over the sides of some very tall buildings--Mission: Impossible has nothing on this--it also touches on a bittersweet sense of mortality as its workers all contemplate their own deaths should they fall from their workplace. A beautiful film.

True/False isn't strictly a documentary festival. Its mission from the outset has been to showcase films in the fuzzy shadowland between truth and fiction, so it's not out of character at all for them to screen fiction. Last year, they showed Troll Hunter, based on its mockumentary styling. This year, they have V/H/S, a new wrinkle on the "found footage" subgenre. New wrinkles are sometimes wrapped around old forms, and in spite of its lo-res, found footage conceit, this is a familiar kind of film. This is our old friend, the anthology horror movie returned to life. V/H/S is a film that Milton Subotsky would have greenlit at Amicus in a heartbeat back in 1971. It's a close cousin to films like Tales from the Crypt, The House that Dripped Blood, and Torture Garden. There are five stories and a framing sequence. Like all anthologies, it's highly variable.

The premise finds a group of sociopathic friends hired to retrieve a mysterious VHS tape from a sinister house. Our "heroes" like to film their stunts, so they take their cameras with them. In the house, they find a dead body and a plethora of videotapes containing disturbing footage. The tapes they find provide the individual stories. In one, a couple of partying dudebros pick up the wrong woman in a bar, in another, a woman brings some of her friends into the woods to act as bait for a mad slasher. My favorite finds a couple on a second honeymoon terrorized by a mysterious woman who films them while they sleep. My least favorite finds another pack of partying dude bros lured to a haunted house. Mostly, they're all of a piece.

As far as horror movie tropes go, this doesn't reinvent the wheel. We get vampires and long-haired ghost girls and a haunted house. The slasher film segment provides a droll take on the penchant of mad slashers to move around the movie via off-screen teleportation. None of this is exactly new. What IS new is the form. Mostly filmed handheld and occasionally nausea inducing, this has a veneer of raw, undoctored footage (which, of course, it isn't--there are plenty of special effects). It's not unwatchable, but it takes some getting used to. I'm less sanguine about the depiction of gender in this film. Men in this movie are all douchebags. Women are generally there to be abused. The opening of the film has some disturbing rape imagery, while date rape figures into the first story and killer lesbians figure into another. I know that character development isn't necessarily the genre's strong point, especially in short form, but this film suffers from the lack more than most.

Watching V/H/S provided a nice callback to the Erik Buckham seminar earlier in the day because Buckham claimed the covers of old horror VHS tapes as one of his prime inspirations. He designed the art for The House of the Devil, too, and one of V/H/S's directors is Ti West. The experience of watching it is like sampling a bunch of old VHS horror movies after they've degraded a bit. Visually, the lo-fi grottiness of V/H/S is in the tradition of crappy 16mm blown up to 35 or the filmed through a glaze of dirt aesthetic of, say, Basket Case or I Spit on Your Grave. It's generally better than those movies, though it should be taken with a grain of salt.

Christiane Benedict is a writer and graphic artist who lives in Columbia, Missouri. She blogs at Krell Laboratories.

Everyone Loves a Parade: Photos From The True/False March March

Peter Knegt — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 17:02:41 GMT

Friday afternoon in Columbia, Missouri, a True/False Film Festival tradition continued with the annual March March. The festival's signature parade marched down Ninth Street with hundreds of locals and visiting filmmakers alike dressing up like their favorite robot or wearing their favorite feather boa.

The event represented the unique spirit and sense of community that sets True/False apart from the vast majority of film festivals, and ended at the historic Missouri Theater, where dozens of local restaurants set up tables offering samples of the best appetizers in an event aptly titled "Reality Bites."

Indiewire was joyously on the scene and snapped a few photos:

True/False 2012 Kicks Off With An 'Undefeated' Homecoming

Peter Knegt — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 19:11:15 GMT

"This might be the biggest crowd that's ever sat in one room and seen this movie," "Undefeated" co-director Dan Lindsay said on stage at the Missouri Theater in Colombia, Missouri last night.

Preceded by a festive masquerade-themed jubilee in the theater's lobby, the event kicked off the 2012 True/False Film Festival. It also marked a significant homecoming for Lindsay, who alongside co-director T.J. Martin won the Oscar for best documentary feature just five days prior.

"This is a total honor for me," he said after being introduced by True/False's David Wilson and Paul Sturtz. "I don't know if you guys know, but I went to the University of Missouri here in Columbia."

Coincidentally, T.J. Martin was absent from the screening because his own alma matter -- Western Washington University -- had scheduled him to present the film that same night.

"I don't know if you saw the Oscars or not, but [not having T.J. here] will definitely keep the f-bombs to a minimum," Lindsay joked.

Lindsay explained that when he was a senior at the University of Missouri was when the Ragtag Cinema -- one of True/False's most beloved venues -- opened up.

"It was the first time in my entire life that I lived in a town that had an art house theater," he said. "I'm pretty sure the first I ever saw was 'The Eyes of Tammy Faye.' And I saw everything that came there... So for these guys to invite me back here to show this film is a total honor. To be able to in Columbia, which is a town I just absolutely love and come back to as often as I can... It's incredible."

"Undefeated" -- which is currently in theaters care of the Weinstein Company -- follows the lives of the coach and players of an inner city high school football team in North Memphis. Sort of a real-life "Friday Night Lights," the film portrays a real-life underdog story with considerable emotion and affect.

"While this is obstensibly a football movie," Lindsay said on stage. "The reason we wanted to make it and the reason we fell in love with the story was more the characters and the honesty that they gave us."

He said that one thing he regretted with his Oscar speech was thanking the subjects of the film.

"On the red carpet you should say this first so you make sure you get it in," Lindsay said. "And she was right. So listen to your moms. Because this film is a complete testament to the people we followed and the trust that they gave us... I really do believe that the film you're about to watch is because of the trust and the emotional intimacy that they afforded us."

True/False continues through Sunday.

True/False Film Festival Announces 2012 Lineup

Aaron Bogert — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 17:49:02 GMT

The True/False Film Festival has announced it's 2012 lineup consisting of 39 feature films and 19 short films from all over the globe.

Leading the festival lineup is Victor Kossakovsky's "Vivan las Antipodas!," Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady's "Detropia," Bart Layton's "The Imposter," and Elizabeth Mims & Jason Tippet's "Only the Young."

A large number of of the films this year will be from a group of new American directors with fresh takes on the documentary format, such as Peter Nicks's "Waiting Room," Chris Moukarbel & Valerie Veatch's "Me at the Zoo," and Daniel Lindsay & T.J. Martin's "Undefeated."

The festival also prides itself on screening international documentaries that may have slipped under American audiences radar such as Rokhsareh Ghaem's "Going Up the Stairs," Jose Alvarez's "Canicula," and Xun Yu's "The Vanishing Spring."

Audiences looking for lighter and more fun documentaries will be able to catch screenings of Morgan Spurlock's "Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan's Hope," and Lauren Greenfield's "The Queen of Versailles."

The festival also announced that it would make the subjects of "Bully" (formerly "The Bully Project") the recipients of the 2012 True Life Fund. Money for the fund, which is sponsored by local church The Crossing, is collected at the fest and organizers hope raise close to $15,000, supplemented by a matching grant from the Bertha Foundation. The award, given annually, goes to subjects of a documentary that are seeking to make change in their communities. The subjects of "Bully" are kids and families who have had to deal with serious, even life-threatening, bullying and are bravely sharing their stories through the film.

As always, the festival will also be showing a selection of seven Secret Screenings. These films will be screening in advance of their world premieres and will be off limits to the press.

Click here for a full schedule of film screening times.

A complete list of 2012 True/False films and their directors

"Bully" : Lee Hirsch
"¡Vivan Las Antipodas!" : Victor Kossakovsky
"1/2 Revolution" : Omar Shargawi and Karim El Hakim
"Abendland" : Nikolaus Geyrhalter
"Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry" : Alison Klayman
"The Ambassador" : Mads Brügger
"Argentinian Lesson" : Wojciech Staron
"The Belovs" : Victor Kossakovsky
"Building Babel" : David Osit
"Canícula" : Jose Ãlvarez
"Comic‐Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope" : Morgan Spurlock
"The Connection" : Shirley Clarke
"Detropia" : Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady
"Going Up the Stairs" : Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami
"Gypsy Davy" : Rachel Leah Jones
"Herman’s House" : Angad Bhalla
"How to Survive a Plague" : David France
"The Imposter" : Bart Layton
"The Island President" : Jon Shenk
"Low & Clear" : Kahlil Hudson and Tyler Hughen
"Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present" : Matthew Akers
"Me @ The Zoo" : Chris Moukarbel and Valerie Veatch
"Only the Young" : Elizabeth Mims and Jason Tippet
"The Queen of Versailles" : Lauren Greenfield
"Searching for Sugar Man" : Malik Bendjelloul
"Summer of Giacomo" : Alessandro Comodin
"WIP" : Omar Mullick & Bassam Tariq
"Undefeated" : Dan Lindsay & T.J. Martin
"V/H/S" : Adam Wingard, Glenn McQuaid, Radio Silence, David Bruckner, Joe Swanberg, and Ti West
"The Vanishing Spring Light": Xun Yu
"The Waiting Room" : Peter Nicks

Shorts
"Grandpa Looked Like William Powell" : David B. Levy
"Old Man and the Lady" : Markku Heikkinen
"1989 (When I was 5 Years Old)" : Thor Ochner
"Aaron Burr, Pt. 2 or Aaron Burr, Part 2" : Dana O’Keefe
"Goodbye, Mandima" : Robert-Jan Lacombe
"Claes" : Martina Carlstedt
"Where is My Mind?" : Martin Ginestie
"Heart" : Jeremy Zagar
"Four Cubic Feet of Space" : Tony Gault
"Back to Land" : Tijana Petrovic
"The Lion Wearers" : Narges Abyar
"Full‐Time Ministry" : Helen Scheer
"Sunshine" : Doug Nichol
"Family Nightmare" : Dustin Guy Defa
"Into the Middle of Nowhere" : Anna Frances Ewert
"Paraíso" : Nadav Kurtz
"Meaning of Robots" : Matt Lenski
"Love Competition" : Brent Hoff
"Pluto Declaration" : Travis Wilkerson

Victor Kossakovsky to Receive True Vision Award at True/False Film Fest

Devin Lee Fuller — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:06:25 GMT

Russian director Victor Kossakovsky will be presented with the True Vision Award at this year's True/False Film Fest.

The award recognizes directors who have advanced the field of nonfiction filmmaking.

True/False will partner with MoMA to screen Kossakovsky's film "¡Vivan las Antipodas!" in advance of its appearance at the True/False Fest.

Full press release below:

True/False Film Fest to Honor Russian Director Victor
Kossakovsky as 2012 True Vision Award Recipient

COLUMBIA, Mo. (Feb. 6, 2012)—Each year the True/False Film Fest gives the True Vision Award, its only prize, to a director whose work has creatively advanced the field of nonfiction filmmaking. This mid‐career award recognizes creativity and commitment to the art and craft of documentary. This year’s True Vision honoree, Victor Kossakovsky, is
a master of his craft.

Though not as well‐known in the U.S. as some past True Vision recipients, Kossakovsky is
renowned for his work in Europe and elsewhere. True/False is joining forces with the
Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York to bring Kossakovsky to the U.S. and
expose American audiences to his unique genius. His most recent film, ¡Vivan las
Antipodas!, will show at MOMA in late February before it shows at True/False March 1‐
4.

Kossakovsky, has won awards at the Amsterdam International Documentary Film
Festival (IDFA), the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the Karlovy Vary International
Film Festival and Dok Leipzig Festival. Kossakovsky also started his own St. Petersburg‐
based production company, to make visionary documentaries unlike any other.

¡Vivan las Antipodas! is one such film, capturing unforgettable, sometimes playful
imagery of the Earth’s antipodal pairs — locations on the planet directly opposite one
another. Kossakovsky examines four different antipodal pairs in the film: Argentina and
China, Spain and New Zealand, Chile and Russia and Botswana and Hawaii.

The film was met with critical acclaim at its premiere at the Venice Film Festival and at
its subsequent showing at IDFA. Also showing at True/False this year is Kossakovsky’s
first film, The Belovs (1994).

For the last nine years the True Vision Award has honored filmmakers in the primes of
their careers, who are working to challenge the traditions of documentary and find new
creative directions in nonfiction filmmaking. Past True Vision winners include Joe
Berlinger & Bruce Sinofsky (2004), Stephen Marshall (2005), Kirby Dick (2006), Brett
Morgen (2007), Alex Gibney (2008), Kim Longinotto (2009), Laura Poitras (2010), and
James Marsh in 2011. Each honoree is given a bronze edition of an original sculpture by Columbia artist Larry Young plus $5000 in credit towards post‐production work at
AlphaCine Labs in Seattle. This year’s award is sponsored by Timothy D. McGarity, MD.
(TMcGarityMD.com)

True/False 2011: The Eight Documentaries You Must See

Basil Tsiokos — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 13:17:28 GMT

Columbia, Missouri's increasingly popular documentary film festival, True/False, wrapped up its 2011 edition March 6 with a screening of Academy Award-winning director Kevin Macdonald's "Life in a Day," which premiered in January simultaneously at Sundance and on YouTube. Following the screening, guests gathered for the "Buskers Last Stand," an annual closing event that gives the local and visiting musicians who open each program a final chance to perform, and finally, an impromptu gathering in the fest's main sponsor hotel's lobby.

David Wilson and Paul Sturtz launched the festival in 2003, but it's already become a haven for nonfiction filmmakers, programmers and industry. Multiple directors began their introductions at True/False this past weekend with some variation of "this is the best festival I've ever been to" or "filmmakers who've come here before urged me to attend." Drawing from the college town's community, the event attracts a loyal crowd that takes its documentaries very seriously. Polled at a late-night Friday screening, when the festival was just 24 hours old, attendees indicated they'd already seen more than five films.

A non-competitive festival (Wilson has stated he doesn't believe in pitting films against one another), T/F showcases its lineup on an even playing field. Freed from concerns about awards and premieres, filmmakers watch each others' films and mingle at the festival's eclectic venues, all within easy walking distance of each other.

Full disclosure: This is the second year I've attended the festival as a "ringleader," assisting staff with introductions and Q&As with the many visiting filmmakers. T/F brings in a number of industry representatives to serve in this role -- or alternately, as "swamis" who offer filmmakers professional advice in one-on-one meetings. Beyond this, other industryites came to Columbia to scout for or support particular films or to otherwise just experience the event, including representatives from Sundance, Cinereach, IFC Films, A&E IndieFilms, the Channel 4 BRITDOC Foundation, the New Orleans Film Society, New Left Media, Chicken and Egg Pictures, and Shooting People. For an event outside of the New York/Los Angeles nexus and of a relatively contained size - four days and just over forty films - this industry and filmmaker presence speaks to its impressive programming and planning.

I was able to watch quite a few films during the course of T/F - catching up on a couple that slipped by me at other festivals, but largely seeing new work, most of which was quite good. Of special note were a couple of themes that emerged, including a continued focus on hybrid docs (as the festival's name suggests, this is regular point of investigation) in films like "The Arbor," "La Bocca del Lupo," "North From Calabria," as well as the fictional doc, "Troll Hunter." There was also a curious exploration of the world of men as seen in varying degrees in films like "Armadillo," "At the Edge of Russia," "Buck," "Fake It So Real," "Hula & Natan," "Knuckle," "Shut Up Little Man," and even "El Bulli: Cooking in Progress" -- films that focused almost exclusively on male protagonists and/or masculinity, largely or completely separated from considerations about women.

What follows are brief capsules of a selection of documentaries screened at T/F that you should be on the lookout for at a festival near you:

"North From Calabria" (Marcin Sauter)
Though unseen, Sauter and his crew infiltrate the quaint Polish village of Chelmsko Slaskie to observe and, in some cases, apparently to instigate a series of events leading up to an annual festival - from rehearsals for a bizarre community theatre play to the comically slow building of the stage on which it's supposed to be performed. Meanwhile, the poetry-writing mayor starts a courtship with a widow, and a group of layabouts start their own film about a hallucinating astronaut. What emerges is at once a charming snapshot of a place, and of the artifice the villagers and the filmmaker are building around it - whether for the festival or for the documentary is not always immediately apparent.

"The Arbor" (Clio Barnard)
The artifice is immediately apparent in the deeply affecting "The Arbor" - the film's opening explains that actors lipsynch actual documentary recordings throughout the film. During the Q&A, Barnard, who picked up the "Best New Documentary Filmmaker" award at last year's Tribeca, explained that this innovative technique was inspired by a play that incorporated the verbatim interviews of residents of the titular housing project where her subjects, playwright Andrea Dunbar and her daughter Lorraine, lived. This practice, together with staged re-enactments from Dunbar's writing, serves to distance the viewer and highlight rather than elide the manipulations that go into non-fiction filmmaking.

"Fake It So Real" (Robert Greene)
As suggested by its title, "Fake It So Real" also confronts artifice, in the form of its subject. In his third feature-length doc in as many years ("Owning the Weather" premiered at Full Frame 2009, while "Kati With An I" screened at T/F last year), Greene profiles a group of would-be professional wrestlers - they haven't quite been able to make money yet - during the lead up to one of their shows in North Carolina. Exploring what goes into the sport/spectacle - from character development to physical training - the film also brilliantly captures a unique men-only world. Veteran performers haze rookie pretty boy Gabriel, curiously obsessed with playfully questioning his heterosexuality - a recurring theme for the group which also includes another wrestler who portrays a flamboyant gay character.

"At the Edge of Russia" (Michael Marczak)
Like "Fake It," a newcomer plays a central role in Polish director Marczak's stunningly shot debut doc feature. The fresh-faced Alexei arrives in remote Siberia to serve as a border guard and is put through his paces by the grizzled and more experienced older soldiers already stationed there. With no women in sight - aside from fatigue-clad girls on calendars - the men act like boys when they're not practicing drills or digging ice shelters: singing songs, arm-wrestling, and cracking jokes to pass the time in a region that the closing titles reveal has never even had any border encroachment. Like Greene's film and fellow soldier-focused T/F title "Armadillo," "Russia" provides a fascinating portrait of a fraternity of men, passing on wisdom despite being stuck in an absurd situation.

"Hula & Natan" (Robby Elmaliah)
An absurdist streak also runs through this year-long portrait of two car mechanics, fittingly described by T/F as "Samuel Beckett meets Sanford & Son in southern Israel." The brothers, based in Sderot, which seems to be under constant bombing, spend their days arguing with one another non-stop, surrounded by an apparently infinite number of stray cats and the carcasses of abandoned customers' cars that they aren't particularly inclined to repair. As they face eviction and family problems, the only constants seem to be their contentious relationship - similar to fellow T/F film, "Shut Up Little Man!" - and the certainty that this too shall pass. In the Q&A, filmmaker Elmaliah revealed that he knew his subjects as a boy and they haven't ever changed, and that his film has made them local superstars, with audiences clamoring for a sequel.

"El Bulli: Cooking in Progress" (Gereon Wetzel)
Wetzel's film, which premiered at IDFA, offers a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how Spanish chef Ferran Adria, a leader in molecular gastronomy, developed and executed the seasonal menu of his exclusive Catalan restaurant, El Bulli, which is slated to shut down permanently in December. The audience becomes privy to the months-long process his cadre of chefs and he go through over the course of a year - extensive and meticulous food experimentation, menu refinement, and implementation when the restaurant reopens for the new season. The documentary captures the joy of surprise and invention while simultaneously providing a window into the working relationship of a group of professional chefs.

"Subway Preacher" (Dennis W Ho)
Ho spent three years following the members of a tiny NYC subway-based born-again Christian ministry. Beyond being bizarrely pre-occupied by the King James Bible and willfully slothful and sexist, its leader, Brian, further demonstrates a remarkable ability to rationalize infidelity and divorce when he abandons his wife Rose for a younger woman. Fascinating in a train-wreck sort of way, "Subway Preacher" might be accused of not being wholly respectful of its subjects, but, at the same time, certain characters, if given enough rope, will hang themselves.

"Habana Muda" (Eric Brach)
A love triangle of another kind is at the core of Brach's Cuban-set film. Chino and Anaylis are a loving deaf-mute heterosexual couple with two adorable kids, and Jose is the Mexican gay man who's started a sexual relationship with Chino and wants to marry him and bring him to Mexico. But there are no secrets or lies here - the savvy Anaylis knows about Jose, and recognizes her husband's relationship has the potential to provide her family with resources they otherwise would never have. What emerges is a complex relationship involving love and affection but also economics and, perhaps, exploitation from multiple directions.

ABOUT THE WRITER: Basil Tsiokos is a Programming Associate, Documentary Features for Sundance, consults with documentary filmmakers and festivals, and recently co-produced Cameron Yates’ feature documentary “The Canal Street Madam.” Follow him on Twitter (@1basil1 and @CanalStMadamDoc) and visit his blog (what (not) to doc).

True/False Announces Initial Slate For 2011

Peter Knegt — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 15:46:34 GMT

The eighth annual True/False Film Fest is set to run March 3-6, 2011 in college town Columbia, MO, and the festival has announced its initial slate of programming. Headed by David Wilson and Paul Sturtz, True/False has consistently drawn rave reviews from filmmakers, industry, and audiences alike in its relatively brief existence on the festival circuit. 2011's edition already looks unlikely to change those perceptions.

Presented over four days and nights packed with documentaries, Sundance standouts like "The Black Power Mix Tape 1967-1974," "The Interrupters," "Buck," "KNUCKLE," "The Redemption of General Butt Naked," "Project Nim," and "Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times" are all already on tap for the fest, as are other recent festival circuit favorites like "The Arbor" and "Armadillo." These are in addition to a series of "surprise screenings" that are not announced until during the festival.

Check out a complete list of announced titles on the festival's website, and check back with indieWIRE for a full list of titles when they are announced.

7 Highlights from the 7th True/False Fest... Plus a Proposal

Andy Lauer — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 08:30:53 GMT

The seventh annual True/False Film Fest wrapped up yesterday in Columbia, MO after presenting four days and nights packed with documentaries. While the popularity of the event among the locals pleasantly surprised some guest directors, it's easy to see why the college town is so supportive of the non-fiction focused festival headed by David Wilson and Paul Sturtz which has consistently drawn rave reviews from filmmakers, industry, and audiences alike in its relatively brief existence on the festival circuit.

The festival, like the town itself, has an easy-going and fun atmosphere. Films are screened in traditional movie theatres as well as in makeshift screening rooms. Musicians AKA "buskers" perform for the audience before each screening begins and pass a hat to accept donations. One of the most popular events during T/F is the annual "March March," an anarchic, colorful parade through the main strip, named for the month during which the festival traditionally ends.

The festival's freewheeling attitude was evident almost immediately – during the introduction of one of my first screenings, Wilson invited a long-time festival attendee, a young woman named Sarah, to say a few words. The audience looked on quizzically as she expressed her love for T/F, introduced her parents who were attending for the first time and her fellow T/F booster, boyfriend Brad, sitting in the audience... and then brought Brad on stage and proposed to him! As Wilson rightly stated, "That doesn't happen at most festivals!" to the applause of the crowd. When Pippa Robinson, the director of the film being screened, took to the stage, she jokingly added, "This is a bit of an anti-climax," and worried that the film, "The British in Bed," which features conversations with couples discussing their relationships, "might put Sarah and Brad off the whole thing..."

A labor of love with a huge volunteer base, the festival boasts audiences as eager to view a film about the fantasy life of a blind five-year-old (“Antoine”) as they are to see the behind-the-scenes story of the 1980s-'90s revitalization of Disney animation (“Waking Sleeping Beauty”). T/F also recruits volunteer "ringleaders" and "swamis" from the larger film industry to, respectively, assist festival staff in introducing screenings/handling Q&As and to advise participating filmmakers on festival strategy, distribution, and other areas.

While True/False is a non-competitive festival, it presents two special awards. Laura Poitras ("The Oath") received the True Vision Award, which recognizes the accomplishments of a filmmaker who has "has creatively advanced the art of nonfiction filmmaking," while "Enemies of the People" was the recipient of the True Life Fund, which aims to raise more than $10,000 to support the ongoing humanitarian work of the filmmakers.

True/False's slogan, "there are no small stories," was evident in the diversity of the programming, which smartly eschews a concern for premieres to instead offer a combination of new discoveries and a selection of some of the best documentaries that have been on the circuit in recent months. Highlights from Sundance, Toronto, IDFA, Tribeca, and elsewhere that I'd already seen but were well-received here included, among others: "Colony," "GasLand," "The Inventions of Dr NakaMats," "Kick in Iran," "Last Train Home," "Racing Dreams," "The Red Chapel," "Restrepo," "Waste Land," and "When We Were Boys."

Among the films I watched at T/F, here are seven highlights from the festival's seventh edition:

"Familia" (Mikael Wiström and Alberto Herskovits)
The story of a poor Peruvian family that must contend with its matriarch's departure to earn money in Spain, "Familia" captures an incredible intimacy between documentary subject and its filmmaker's camera. Wiström explained during the film's Q&A that he has been part of his subjects' lives for over 30 years, and this is his third documentary involving them. He also explained that he has written a book about their relationship and its socioeconomic complexities and disparities, but has not found a North American publishing outlet.

A scene from Stephen Marshall's "Holy Wars."

"Holy Wars" (Stephen Marshall)
Marshall set out to explore religious fundamentalism, focusing on an evangelical conservative Christian and a radicalized Irish convert to Islam, both believing in the impending end of the world. Following the men as they proselytize around the world and fight against secularization, the film really takes off when, breaking the conventional boundaries of the filmmaker/subject relationship, Marshall suggests the two men meet to debate their opposing viewpoints – a meeting which has a surprisingly profound effect on one, causing a paradigmatic shift in his beliefs.

"Cowboys in India" (Simon Chambers)
Another film that puts the filmmaker/subject relationship in sharp relief, Chambers' intended exposé of the environmental and human rights abuses of a Western company in India instead becomes a humorous exploration of his own relationship with his local guides. Though he initially suspects that his guide and driver may be both literally and figuratively taking him for a ride, he comes to recognize the impact his presence has on them, their safety, and their livelihood. Their cross-cultural exchange calls into question documentary intent and the relationship between the developed and developing world.

"The Mirror" (David Christensen)
Another humorous film, Christensen makes a portrait of the denizens of a small Alpine village who try to reinvigorate their community in the cold, dark winter months by installing a large mirror in a mountain to reflect the sun onto its central square. Structured as a fairy tale, accompanied by introductory title cards that amusingly and suggestively summarize the "chapter" contents, Christensen mines the inherent absurdist and situational comedy, especially from the village's mayor, and discovers a range of charismatic and eclectic subjects.

"As Lilith" (Eytan Harris)
Perhaps one of the most eccentric subjects in T/F's line-up is the title figure from Harris' film, a distinctly unorthodox (in both the religious and secular sense of the word) Israeli woman who must contend with the infuriating invasive actions of an Orthodox group that tries to force her to give her recently deceased daughter a “proper” Jewish burial rather than the cremation already decided upon. As the group goes to absurd lengths to determine the fate of the daughter's remains, the film reveals the extremes of religious dogmatism and patriarchal control.

"Kati with an I" (Robert Greene)
In many ways both a universal and a singular portrait of an adolescent woman's life, director Greene deftly reveals a handful of ordinary yet pivotal days at the end of his half-sister's high school senior year. While on the surface, there doesn't immediately appear to be much that distinguishes Kati from your typical teenager, that's partially the point - she stands in as an everywoman, or everygirl, as she begins, naively at times, to make the transition from late childhood to early adulthood, not fully foreseeing the consequences of her decisions.

"The British in Bed" (Pippa Robinson)
A high concept documentary done simply, economically, and effectively, Robinson's film joins eight couples, varying in age, race, religion, and sexuality, in their bedrooms, and asks them to talk about their relationship. The camera becomes a de facto couples counselor, coaxing revelations for some that are at times funny, endearing, and poignant. Ultimately, the film wonderfully transcends the specificity of its title by conveying the universality of the subject.

[Basil Tsiokos is a Programming Associate, Documentary Features for the Sundance Film Festival, filmmaker/festival consultant, and a Co-Producer on “The Canal Street Madam,” premiering in the documentary competition this month at SXSW. Follow him on Twitter: @1basil1]