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True/False Film Fest 2025: Excavation, Therapy, Protest
Resurrection Hu Sanshou’s Resurrection premiered at last year’s Taiwan International Documentary Festival; this year, the director was awarded the annual True Vision award at True/False before the first of two showings of this feature. A classically exemplary slab of rigorously conceived Chinese nonfiction, Hu’s fifth feature was executed under the larger auspices of the Folk Memory Project, a group of Chinese films focusing on the Great Famine of 1959-61. Resurrection’s first 15 minutes are giganticist in the vein of Zhao Liang’s Behemoth minus funky distorting lenses, beginning with an extremely gods-eye perspective of a tractor working cliffside, a tinily perceptible human eventually emerging for scale. Sanshou finds a number of similarly overwhelming perspectives while moving closer to the earth with each shot to realize a more human scale; after 15 minutes, dialogue finally begins and the film settles into a mostly unvaried A/B alternation between locked-off shots of villagers excavating dead bodies from the ground and reconstructions of the lives of those found. Those unearthings are extremely physical, the villagers getting right in there with their (sometimes) gloved hands, yanking out dead grass from eye sockets before trying to reconstruct skeletons in the order of diagrams they find online. Their collective relationship to death is extremely unsentimental, the ungenteel physicality unnerving. Throughout, Hu’s artful eye takes repeated advantage of smoke emanated sporadically by fireworks set off in memory of the dead and perpetually by old men relentlessly smoking, dust rising from hammers breaking through stone, and—most unnervingly—the steam that rises when the lime on those bones starts evaporating.
The unearthed’s biographies take split-screen form: on the left, black-ink watercolors of the deceased’s face are slowly, albeit always incompletely, filled in; on the right, in a chatbox-like space, the collectively edited-down memories of friends and family are presented one English-language subtitle at a time, lingering to fill the frame before disappearing again. These reminiscences seem mercilessly accurate in their evaluations without aspiring towards active malice. One villager is characterized as combative and bad-tempered; another quarreled so badly with family members that both his sister and mother committed suicide. Resurrection climaxes with a structurally inevitable shift from static austerity to its sole moving-camera sequence: a body inside a wooden coffin being transported by the villagers to its final resting place, going up a slope with an intense gradient while holding their hands against the walls to balance as they struggle up; the camera moves among them, and you can almost feel the literal weight of the enterprise. Nonfiction arthouse programmers, especially in communities with large Chinese diaspora audiences, should take particular note of both Hu’s work and the larger Folk Memory Project.
Hu confirmed his seriousness of intent and emergence from a tradition of rigor with the sidebar movie he selected to have shown as a formative influence: Derek Jarman’s Blue, projected on 35mm at 9:45 am on Sunday to a gratifyingly full and attentive crowd.1 The filmmaker was presumably also given a choice about which of his other features he wanted to highlight and, rather inexplicably, chose his first feature, shot when he was 19 years old. Hometown Village is accurately/baldly called, on the Taiwan festival’s website, Old People and My Hometown, which is pretty much the size of it. Here, Hu operates in a much more orthodox, mildly punishing oral history vein, offering extended shots of elderly villagers remembering famine in repetitive, unbroken stretches. In the festival’s context, this movie (made before Hu even graduated!) might most productively be seen as an illustration of how far he’s come since then; Resurrection’s choral blasts of reminiscence is both a canny formal analogue for collective experience and a way to edit down oral testimony to the best, most pertinent bits and nothing more.
Now in its 22nd year, True/False often operates as a clearing-house of sorts for contemporary documentary anxieties, of which I’ve developed a mental bingo card. A textbook example came in Danial Shah’s Make It Look Real, whose main subject tells the behind-the-camera filmmaker that while he’s not comfortable around most people, “I’m so comfortable around you.” Words every documentarian wants to hear! One of the fest’s usual cullings from IDFA’s plentiful lineup, the 67-minute Make It Look Real ostensibly profiles Muhammad, a kiosk photographer in Pakistan who produces proudly crude PhotoShops of customers in their preferred fantasy backdrops—sometimes with women, more often shirking at the very thought, either way often toting Kalashnikovs. “Why?” Shah keeps asking them; the closest he gets to an answer that many of the stall’s customers grew up in rural areas where those weapons were endemic—but why Kalashnikovs over any other gun model specifically, and whether anyone ever finds this remotely menacing as casual civilian gear, never gets clarified.
The interactions between Muhammad and customers blithely indifferent to perspective as a baseline visual principle are predictably semi-comic, but the meat of the film is in its director-subject interplay. Also born in Pakistan but long based overseas, Shah is a working freelance photographer who, at the time of shooting, had just moved to Belgium; the gap between his life options, and that of his subject’s, is always clear. Fundamentally sweet-natured, Muhammad offers to let Shah sleep at his place as necessary but offers no drama, aside from occasionally fantasizing about paying to have himself black-market-smuggled to Europe. The film’s emphasis is firmly on the ethically handled, warm and loving interaction between a documentarian and his subject—on-trend nonfiction catnip, culminating with its subject’s expressed wish that perhaps the film will allow him to travel when it’s finally shown. Shah agrees that this should be the case, as do I; festivals, free your travel budgets!
An actively therapeutic project, Maxime Jean-Baptiste’s Listen to the Voices concerns the impact of the killing of his cousin, Lucas Diomar, on the director’s family. Aka DJ Turbulence, Diomar was 19 when he died; his mother Nicole has come to a place of forgiveness for the killer, but the director’s 13-year-old nephew Melrick is still raw. Structured around Melrick’s summer visit from France to stay with Nicole in Guinea, Listen to the Voices gets a lot of milage out of copious gimbal shots that nimbly keep up with Melrick during soccer games and at drumline practice. Those drums are intricately mixed in stereo, a measure of the film’s generally attention to sonic and visual texture; this is a credible feature debut (appropriately be proceeding directly to New Directors/New Films), even if its ending does not quite land. The climax has Nicole explaining the notion of forgiveness and its value to a seething Melrick; her testimony may be moving, but not quite to him, as he’s still skeptical by scene’s end. The interaction should be indelible, but it comes off a little attenuated, complete with cutaway shots out the window to cover the gap.
Operating in the same lane as 2023’s Time Bomb Y2K, Ian Bell’s WTO/99 is likewise an all-archival reconstruction making the argument that a seemingly minor turn-of-the-millennium incident actually contained all the ominous seeds of our dreadful present. Where Time Bomb showcased gun-toting apocalypticist militias alongside technocrats who actually managed to solve a problem (it could never happen here, and it never will again), WTO/99 is dourer by the very nature of its subject: the arguably unsuccessful anti-globalization protests against a 1999 WTO meeting in Seattle, which quickly descended into cop-on-protester confrontation. In its opening moments, WTO/99 invites us to consider once again why exactly American liberals are so milquetoast and self-defeating, as an activist en route to protest is asked what she thinks it’ll take for the police to break out the tear gas; “if there’s a need,” she answers. This, of course, is not what happened, as WTO/99 reconstructs at enervating length, devoting nearly half of its 100-minute running time to a needlessly forensic reconstruction of day one of four of the protests—ultimately fairly minor events that don’t need to be pored over so exhaustively, just another day of a freakishly militarized police force getting down to business. (And I really wish the whole thing hadn’t ended with a wrap-up montage set with lunkheaded irony to Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You.”)
Complaints aside, WTO/99 did successfully plunge me back into a fog of millennial anti-nostalgia, proving that I can still ID Phil Gramm without a chyron identifier. (Real ’90s kids know!) I nodded grimly as the left responded to getting its ass literally kicked by…having Jello Biafra play a show alongside members of Soundgarden and Krist Novoselic’s post-Nirvana group Sweet 75. It is indeed a dismal historical trip when closing words of sanity emerge from the mouth of Alan Keyes, the Black Republican Obama birth certificate truther who, in the context of the current Republican Party, plays as downright FDResque while summing up the case against deregulated global free trade. Still, I have trouble giving him the last word, so I’ll give that instead to a protestor who, while acknowledging the futility and exhaustion of it all, makes the best case for activism in words that are 100% going to apply to the US for the foreseeable future: “Maybe we should try to make this country a better place so the rest of the world can have peace.”
1 The movie I’d nominate as most exemplifying “the projectionist’s nightmare” is Richard Serra’s 1969 Frame, in which the artist measures around a window that precisely fills up almost the entire film frame; misproject the 16mm ever so slightly either way and the film becomes visually illegible. Blue, which I’d never seen before, revealed itself as the exact opposite when, at one of the reel changes, the changeover circles were visible frame center. In a technical sense, the whole reel had been misprojected, with the top in the middle, but with an image consisting solely of one shade of blue, how would you ever be able to tell?↩
