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Dreams, Memory, Resistance: True/False 2025
True False 2025 party (photo: AJ Lores) True False Film Festival, nestled in college town Columbia, MO, is a festival for documentarians and people who love documentaries—which is a lot of people in that part of the world, it turns out. Boosting the intellectual substance is a pre-filmfest conference, “Based on a True Story,” at the renowned journalism school at University of Missouri. Rounding out the cultural experience, buskers come from throughout the Midwest to play before shows, and every business with a corner of space turns into an art gallery. And then there’s a Mardi Gras-style party and parade to complete the community atmosphere. It’s an action-packed but human-sized experience, too rare among film festivals with international reputations.
The selections include reprises of Sundance faves, which this year included Violet Du Feng’s The Dating Game, a crowdpleaser about hapless guys looking for dating tips in a country with 30 million extra men. (It could have been cruel, but true to Du Feng’s lovingly observational style, it’s a wry insider’s visit to lived realities inside China instead.) There are preview peeks of upcoming streamer docs like NatGeo’s Sally, by Cristina Costantini. It’s a handsome portrait of astronaut Sally Ride from the perspective of people who loved her, most of all her longtime partner Tam O’Shaughnessy—who agreed to keep their relationship quiet for 27 years, until Sally’s death.
Selling dreams
What a lot of folks, me included, treasure are the authorial films that explore the medium, each gambling thousands of hours of people’s lives on the dream of sharing the work. Some are aesthetic statements, like Tamar Lando’s Land with No Rider, filmed almost exclusively in the late afternoon “golden hour” in the New Mexico scrubland where a few old timers still run small cattle herds. Lando’s photographic expertise shines through, and the film also showcases the trust she has garnered with the old timers, who muse about their long relationship with land, cattle, and occasionally other human beings.
Some films are quiet statements as well as stories. Manuel Acuña A’s The Silence of My Hands, for instance, recounts a Deaf lesbian couple’s long-distance love story. Some take you places; Eleanor Mortimer’s How Deep Is Your Love follows a group of scientists exploring the deep ocean, where astonishing creatures live (and then die upon being dragged to the surface, to add to our knowledge).
Courtney Stephens and Michael Almereyda’s John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office re-imagines the biopic in telling the idiosyncratic journey of John Lilly from clinical psychologist to psychedelic guru, enabled by dolphins. Aided with meticulous use of archival footage, the film observes a cool narrator’s distance from a story rife with sexism, patronizing privilege and animal cruelty. “I’m interested in people who sell dreams,” Stephens said. “He was proto-Silicon Valley; we’re all living in John Lilly’s world.”
The politics of memory
A main theme, appropriate to the tumultuous political moment, emerged among the authorial films: the politics of memory. Two Chinese films both featured intensely personal verité of small-town China, pushing back against the erasure of rapid industrialization with oral histories. Hu Sanshou’s slow-cinema film Resurrection is part of the Chinese independent cinema Folk Memory Project. This is part of a series he is filming in his home town; here, he recounts without commentary the process of moving skeletons from a burial site about to become part of a new highway. Quiet moments of comedy happen, along with arduous hauling and digging. Hu is the True Vision Award winner this year; the fest’s only award honors an artist’s “dedication to the advancement of nonfiction filmmaking.”
Yehui Zhao’s May the Soil Be Everywhere looks back at the journey three generations of her family have made from rural valley, where they were farmers, to apartment-living and professional life in a city. She adds gentle touches of whimsical animation to a verité story anchored in her profoundly loving relationship with the grandmother who raised her. “I wanted to discover how the elders went through these drastic changes,” she said. “These villages are disappearing, elders are passing away, that history will be forgotten. We need to have space to understand and reflect on who we were, are, and are becoming as we progress.”
Memory of resistance
Several U.S. films leveraged memory as acts of empowerment, resistance, and activism. Notable was Seeds, also a Sundance top award-winner. Brittany Shyne follows Black Southern farmers battling age, bureaucracy, Big Ag and racism to enact their present and build a future for their loved ones. The film quietly invites viewers to settle into the daily lives of people, often socializing in their cars. (Malika Zouhali-Worrall’s editing elegantly brings forward the human interactions, out of material filmed over years.) In the background of their days runs an ongoing struggle to get the USDA to deliver on its promise of fair treatment to Black farmers. Producer Sabrina Schmidt Gordon said, “It’s important for me that we tell stories about our communities with authenticity, nuance and specificity. That alone is an act of disruption in a media landscape of reductive narratives. Valuing the quiet moments is act of resistance. The denial of USDA farm supports is a story of injustice and betrayal, but it is also one of dignity, courage and determination.”
Two films bring back major moments of protest and change. Deaf President Now! (soon on Apple TV) is a spellbinding story of a week in 1988 at Gallaudet University, the only college worldwide serving Deaf and hearing-impaired students exclusively. Students rose up to protest the appointment of yet one more non-Deaf university president, and won. Alternating archival footage with interviews with the movement’s student leaders, the film takes us moment by moment through a crisis that became an international scandal. The tick-tock of the students’ story is gripping and inspiring; it also means that context drops out. There is no reference to rise of the wider disability rights movement until a card at the end; the work of left-wingers in the National Association of the Deaf, and support for a Deaf president before that moment by Congressmen and Vice-President Bush go by the wayside. But especially for those confronting terrifying and military-grade police presence in today’s demonstrations, it is impressive to see the respect given protesters by law enforcement.
Ian Bell’s entirely archival WTO/99 retells the events of three days in 1999 Seattle, when thousands of protesters from political, environment and cultural groups—and just outraged citizens—came out against brutally anti-labor, anti-environment trade conditions. The careful chronology, grounded in massive archival research, pits some archival clips against each other and matches others, overall to tell a well-verified story. Protesters were overwhelmingly nonviolent, militarized police grossly violated their peacekeeping mandate and the First Amendment rights of citizens, and mainstream media were complicit with authorities in marginalizing protest. It’s an important film for today, and a reminder of how neoliberal anti-labor, anti-environmental policies have brought us here. It is poignant to hear the police chief bemoan, much later, that police had not learned from his mistakes in overreaching. The event “shows that people who often disagreed on a number of issues could find common cause in the preservation of fundamental rights, and be unified out of concerns for the health of democracy,” Bell said. Here, too, the tick-tock makes the story riveting, but you’ll have to fill in on your own the context of the wider anti-globalist movement that arose with the Rust Bowlification of industrial America.
“A real fight”
River of Grass, by Sasha Wortzel, is a rare environmental film to succeed both in expressing collective grief about climate change and inspiring activism to adapt and resist further depradations. Her subject is the much-abused Everglades, huge parts of which have been destroyed for real estate developers, in the process amplifying hurricane threats and imperiling water quality and access throughout southern Florida. Her central characters include Marjory Stoneman Douglas, the fierce environmental writer and organizer, and Betty Osceola, a Miccosukee spiritual leader. With breathtaking cinematography by J. Bennett (Richard Leacock would be envious), the majestic Everglades becomes a character of its own. I left River of Grass with Stoneman Douglas’ words echoing in my head: “It’s a real fight…and you have to keep on fighting.”
How to Build a Library, by Maia Lekow and Christopher King, tells an international story with deep local implications. Two Kenyan women disgusted by a corrupt government’s abandonment of a public library (one founded by and for white colonialists, too) decide to make it the “palace for the people” that libraries can be in a democracy. In the process they have to work with and against the library staff and legislators, smiling all the time and sometimes in heels. And when we leave them, they are actually winning. The Kenyan circumstances are specific, but the challenges of overcoming inertia, entitlement, corruption, and even getting along with your allies are all familiar to any organizer. This film will be valuable for everything from corporate and arts management programs to political science to postcolonial studies, but it also will richly entertain.
The politics of reality
For a festival called True False, it is a little surprising there isn’t more discussion in Q&As about the ethics of aesthetic choices in a genre with one sole distinguishing claim: to represent reality with integrity. And that claim is crucial. Viewers come to a film expecting that what they see is what happened, and that archival footage is what it says it is. That representation of reality is also why documentaries play such an outsized role in public knowledge.
Charlie Shackleton’s Zodiac Killer Project devotes the entire film to the topic, as while imagining how he would have made a true crime doc, he slyly and with insouciance reveals the how-to of the most common true-crime tropes. In the process, he makes clear that it’s a piece of cake to pretend to tell the truth, in decisions that play with real lives and deaths.
Several films deliberately blur the line between fiction and factual. For instance, Maxime Jean-Baptiste’s Kouté Vwa tells the story of a French Guinean boy’s coming to awareness of his musician uncle’s death at 18. It’s part acted and scripted, part re-enacted, part dream sequence, and part documentary, but we’re never sure which part is which. Gabrielle Brady’s The Wolves Always Come Out at Night enlists a Mongolian family to re-enact a version of many such rural migrants from their sheepherding, nomadic existence to a plot in town. But it’s unclear which parts, if any, are documentary, and which are being scripted, staged, or re-enacted. We can call these films “hybrid,” and celebrate creativity, but at the same time, both commercial exploiters (true crime!) and political actors are delighted with making lies look truthful.
GenAI and truth
The question of reality did erupt in the pre-fest conference, over generative AI. Archival producer Deb McClutchy (she worked on WTO/99, and is a leader in Archival Producers Alliance) argued that archival material should be what it says it is, among other things because viewers believe what you show them is true and real. Director Marley McDonald (Time Bomb Y2K) wasn’t troubled by that; she argued that “historical truth is first of all an act of imagination,” which allows for creative use of AI. (She did not address the APA’s best-practices recommendation of transparency, appropriate labelling.) Artist Damon Davis (Whose Streets?) is using genAI to imagine undocumented Black realities. He said, “People don’t care about the truth. If science and facts worked on people, the world wouldn’t look the way it does. I’m engaged with mythology, identity and power.” But meanwhile, right-wing forces are whirling away with their AI-fueled nightmares, and calling it documentary.
Work and community.
Labor issues lurked in the background, as usual. But they moved to the forefront at the pre-fest conference, on a panel about how to sustain or reimagine the industry in crisis. Panelists told story after story about making films critical of the immiserating terms of late capitalist life, and finding the industry indifferent or hostile. Red Owl’s Alice Quinlan, who led grassroots distribution efforts around Union, about organizing Staten Island Amazon workers, said, “It is unfortunately quite common for an independent documentary film to not get distribution offers. But on Union, we know both corporate and nonprofit entities had concerns regarding championing a film about labor organizing. If I’m not surprised this was the case, I am surprised we have this information – this should be embarrassing for them to admit.” Conference co-organizer Robert Greene agreed: “Bootlicking is rampant right now. The forces that create the difficulties for us are directly tied to the creeping oligarchy we’re falling into.” Impact producer Mia Bruno called for more grassroots community-building: “Growing right wing companies like Angel Studios are doing very well. We have created an insular doc community where depressing amounts of money are poured into awards campaigns, and we need to look out, not in.” Documentary Producers Alliance Midwest member Andrew Sherburne said, “Audiences are power, we need to treat them as a part of the film.”
Quinlan also offered rare clarity on the business crisis: “This is a labor organizing conversation.” A conversation about the health of the industry was a conversation about working conditions. The Documentary Producers Alliance had a packed brunch at the fest, and a Kartemquin party was also full of talk about organizing.
Indeed, documentarians need to join their unions and professional associations, where they can, and build them where they must. They need to support labor organizing, and tell those compelling stories in their films.
