True/False Film Fest 2015
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Dispatches from Sundance, Berlin, SXSW, True/False & Thessaloniki
Sundance SCOTT MACAULAY Check it out: the two top prize winners at Sundance this year, Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s Me and Earl and the Dying Girl, and Crystal Moselle’s The Wolfpack, both feature as central elements teenagers who stage and film their own versions of classic movies. There’s even overlap between the two films, although Moselle’s Manhattan shut-ins incline more towards Tarantino and Freddy Krueger, while Gomez-Rejon’s teen Pittsburgh auteurs shirk the Romero roots of their hometown for deep dives into the Criterion Collection. For film lovers of a certain age, both Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and The Wolfpack […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Apr 28, 2015 -
Anything Can Happen: True/False’s Sidebar Neither/Nor 2015 Investigated Polish Documentary Traditions
Now in its third year, the Neither/Nor sidebar of the annual True/False Film Festival has quickly become both a fundamental facet and essential rejoinder to the curatorial ideal of the program proper. Free of categorical imperatives, the festival’s binary brand has become over time a kind of shorthand for an often uncategorizable strain of filmmaking in which the ethos of nonfiction is consistently complicated by the visual language of fiction. The idea behind Neither/Nor is the reconstruction of a continuum between past and present iterations of this method, teasing out parallels between classic and contemporary storytelling modes while contextualizing the […]
by Jordan Cronk on Apr 6, 2015 -
True/False 2015: Rules of the Game, Spartacus & Cassandra and I Am The People
For once my favorite movie of True/False 2015 was an honest-to-goodness crowdpleaser, a counterintuitively funny film on a grim topic. Claudine Bories and Patrice Chagnard had the earned gumption to title their film Rules of the Game; in French it’s distinguished from Renoir’s film by the first word being Les rather than La, but that distinction doesn’t translate. It’s not just a cutely attention-getting appropriation: Renoir’s film anatomizes unspoken codes of conduct for French high society which, if observed, should successfully conceal hypocrisies and personal betrayals. Bories and Chagnard’s reworked title refers to clothing, eye contact, portfolio neatness and other job interview variables that — rather than work ethic and qualifications […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 17, 2015 -
True/False 2015 Shorts: Former Models, The Woolworths Choir of 1979, My Gal, Rosemarie and Abandoned Goods
Outside the avant-garde world, shorts are rarely granted extended critical writing — it’s hard to justify the expense of covering these hardest-to-see of items, confined as they often are to festivals and specialized screenings, so it’s up to salaried editors like me to step up when possible. (Making this my first piece about True/False 2015 may be straining to make the point, but I can live with that.) Case in point: Benjamin Pearson’s Former Models has been in circuation since 2012, but written information besides the broad outline is hard to find. In part, that’s due to the short’s sheer density: […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 12, 2015 -
“I’m Not Interested in Cinema”: Adam Curtis on Bitter Lake
This weekend the True/False Film Festival will bestow its annual True Vision Award to BBC house provocateur Adam Curtis “in honor of his dedication to and advancement in the field of nonfiction filmmaking.” Although the 59-year-old Curtis doesn’t think of himself as a filmmaker, it seems like an apt choice; he’s become one of the cinema’s essential purveyors of historical counter-narratives. In films largely made for TV and internet audiences consisting mostly of found footage collage techniques, he uses an aesthetic language as indebted to experimentalist Bruce Connor as it is to the sensationalist evening news of the 1980s, making the […]
by Brandon Harris on Mar 5, 2015 -
Previewing the 2015 True/False Film Festival
I’m an unabashed partisan for the True/False Film Festival (this will be my sixth consecutive year attending), which kicks off tomorrow and runs through Sunday. There are 37 features in this year’s line-up, plus four shorts programs, the first five episodes of Andrew Jarecki’s HBO mini-series The Jinx, and another five “secret screenings” — films identified in the program only by color, shown here prior to their official world premieres elsewhere. This is also the third year of the Neither/Nor sidebar, and this year’s edition is especially ambitious, a plunge into the largely underknown world of Polish documentary, complete with […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 4, 2015 -
The 2015 True/False Film Fest Lineup
Here’s the 39-film strong main lineup of this year’s True/False Film Fest, the increasingly-prominent annual documentary festival (with room for what that means) that takes place in Columbia, Missouri. Our coverage begins when the festival does; this year it runs from March 5th-8th. Almost There (Aaron Wickenden, Dan Rybicky) — “Almost There is a coming-of-(old)-age story about 83-year-old Peter Anton, an “outsider” artist living in isolated and crippling conditions whose world changes when two filmmakers discover his work and storied past. Shot over eight years, Almost There documents Anton’s first major exhibition and how the controversy it generates forces him […]
by Vadim Rizov on Feb 11, 2015
