The 1970s: an oil and energy crisis, numerous coup d’états (some failed, some successful), a massacre at the 1972 Summer Olympics, the rise (Margaret Thatcher, Augusto Pinochet) and falls (Richard Nixon) of world leaders, the beginning (Lebanon) and end (Vietnam) of drawn-out wars, and a New York-based serial killer who terrorized young adults because his neighbor’s dog ordered him to. Oh, to go back again! Stateside, the ’70s saw further proliferation of rock music, drugs, second-wave feminism, the Black Panther movement and general  political unrest and upheaval. Titled after a since-closed Catskills camp for disabled youth that was itself something […]

“You guys are going to spend the next year stuck quarantined with buskers,” a friend wrote on my way to True/False, which seemed to be sliding just under the wire of possibility even before I got there–a foreboding confirmed by day two, when SXSW became the first film festival to cancel. Onscreen, every handshake and hug was charged with an unintended jolt; in the theaters, elbow bumps were exchanged, nervous jokes made and telltale pools of soapy foam collected at the bottom of bathroom sinks. On its last day, True/False added one of SXSW’s now-homeless premieres, a special by (noted […]

The lineup is out for this year’s True/False Film Fest, running March 5 to 9. Find the full list below (including this year’s Neither/Nor retrospective sidebar, focusing on Missouri born and raised filmmakers, and a retrospective for True Vision honorees Bill and Turner Ross) along with links to trailers and some previous coverage of a few directors from our end. All descriptions from the festival. 45365 Dir. Bill & Turner Ross; 2009; 94 min. An ode to the colors and characters of small-town Americana, True Vision honorees Bill and Turner Ross’ debut is a sweeping portrait of their birthplace, Sidney, […]

Over the past year, various reckonings—from continued collective and individual action around #metoo to protests against institutions accepting donations from the Sackler family, Warren B. Kanders and oil giants like BP—that media and arts institutions have gone through have brought the weaponization of cultural capital via art-world philanthropy onto the front pages of newspapers. Meanwhile, in the U.S. documentary film field, the way we’re talking about who holds power and how it’s dispensed has remained narrowly focused.  Film festivals have jumped into this fray with public forums, panels and talks at which emboldened filmmakers and a new crop of festival […]

Where Brett Story’s previous feature, The Prison in Twelve Landscapes, interrogated the US’s carceral system in twelve formally and thematically distinct segments, her new film The Hottest August approaches climate change, in its broadest sense, through a freeflowing diaristic chronicle of a summer month. Over August of 2017, Story and her crew traveled to all five boroughs of NYC, capturing a broad polyphony of voices that, pleasingly, refuses to stay strictly on-thematic-task. The film just premiered at True/False before proceeding to SXSW; the first screening there is today. Over FaceTime Audio, I spoke to Story about working with a small crew, redefining […]

Gearing up for its 16th edition, the True/False Film Fest has announced the first components of this year’s programming. Filmmaker Hassan Fazili, director of the just-premiered-at-Sundance Midnight Traveler, and his family, will receive the True Life Fund, awarded to documentary subjects. Click here to read our interview with Fazili. This year’s True Vision Award will be presented to Spain-born, Mexico-based filmmaker Nuria Ibáñez Castañeda. Following on the heels of past recipients such as Laura Poitras and Claire Simon, Ibáñez Castañeda—whose films include 2013’s excellent The Naked Room, a harrowing look inside a therapist’s office counseling abused children—will receive the award along with a retrospective […]

In 1976, German screenwriter/producer Peter Märthesheimer wrote the punchily titled essay “What Can the Hero Do? He Can Change the World! A Few Problems Concerning Drama Production.” He began: Many television plays, good and bad, have come about because a drama producer or script-writer has said at some time or other, ‘Something ought to be made about…’ Then a so-called ‘theme’ usually follows, a ‘problem’ which the person who thought it so serious that he wanted to ‘make something about it’ considers relevant […] Now there would be nothing against this approach, which cautiously and discerningly commits itself to the […]

For its 15th edition, the doc-centric, hybrid-friendly annual True/False Film Fest has unveiled a lineup of 40 features, with no less than six world premieres. Black Mother, Khalik Allah’s keenly-awaited follow-up to Field Niggas, is one, as is América, the feature debut from Chase Whiteside & Erick Stoll (profiled in last year’s 25 New Faces of Film). Here’s the lineup; shorts will be announced tomorrow, with the full schedule released on Saturday. For more information, visit the festival’s website. Adriana’s Pact (dir. Lissette Orozco; 2017) The director idolized her glamorous aunt, whose political past holds dark secrets. (Presented by the Kinder Institute on […]

In the past decade, I have screened thousands of documentary festival submissions. That amounts to countless hours of observing — or, more often than not, being told about — the horrifying effects of war, discrimination, depression, censorship, animal slaughter, plastic bottles, shoddy reporting, asbestos and mountaintop removal. Befitting this past decade of “hope,” I have also been given the tools to fix those problems: a program I can donate to, a message to spread to my community, a website I can visit to learn more. Nearly every one of these films has failed to leave an impression. They don’t make […]