Deniz Tortum
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True/False 2022: Reconvening
One of my favorite memories of attending a decade-plus of True/False is from the 2015 edition of the now-defunct Neither/Nor sidebar, annually dedicated to a small retrospective with accompanying monograph. A selection of unknown-to-me Polish cinema programmed by Ela Bittencourt structured that year’s on-the-ground experience from my first screening, Marcel Łoziński’s 1981 How to Live, as hilarious as promised by its description: “In the 1970s, young Polish couple [sic] attend a government-sponsored summer camp where they learn to become the ideal communist family.” The sidebar produced a number of related beguiling sights, not least the now very senior filmmakers in attendance […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 21, 2022 -
True/False 2017 Critic’s Notebook 1: Resistance and Futility
This was my eighth (!) year attending the True/False Film Fest, and the first during which I wasn’t in a continuously 100% optimal mood — not the festival’s fault, attributable instead to the foul ambient fug emanating from the White House. I’ve written about my skepticism/aversion towards the “now more than ever art must lead the resistance” school of thought and was in no mood for any such films; instead, I was jolted by a series of works about the frequent futility of such practices. Carmine Grimaldi and Deniz Tortum’s half-hour If Only There Were Peace is a documentary about making a narrative film, […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 8, 2017
