True/False Film Fest
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True/False: A Place for World Premieres?
Despite its stated policy about not announcing a film’s premiere status, is the True/False Film Fest the new place to launch your documentary? In part one of a three part series, filmmaker and writer Robert Greene will chronicle the fortunes of five films that will world premiere at the 2014 True/False Film Festival, including his own, Actress. No film festival has meant more to me than True/False. My last two films (Kati with an I and Fake It So Real) began their lives in Columbia, MO — in front of the festival’s famously engaged crowds, amidst its street parades and […]
by Robert Greene on Feb 25, 2014 -
Learning to Love the Heterodoxy
During this year’s True/False Film Festival, I sat on a panel with four formidable colleagues to bat around the question of how, pray tell, critics should evaluate documentary films. Should we approach nonfiction films differently than we approach fiction films, or as part of the same continuum? Should we evaluate documentaries on a content curve, taking subject matter, political intent or real world impact into account, or should we see them as cinema, full stop? I’m not sure we made any great strides toward consensus on these questions, but I’m also not sure that consensus would be of any service […]
by Eric Hynes on Apr 23, 2013 -
True/False Dispatch #2: Sleepless Nights and Computer Chess
Making its North American premiere at True/False, Eliane Raheb’s Sleepless Nights is ostensibly about the Lebanese Civil War’s fallout. The opening title cards recap the conflict’s history in a bewilderingly quick synopsis, and if you’re not already informed on the subject (I went in shamefully ignorant), it’ll take a while to get your bearings. The principal subjects are Assaad Shaftari, a former Christian militia senior intelligence official, credited with approving some 500 deaths; and Maryam Saiidi, whose son vanished following one skirmish — the “battle of the science building” — out of a long, complicated history (the War lasted 15 […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 8, 2013 -
True/False 2013 Dispatch #1: These Birds Walk, The Garden Of Eden, The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear
Banner news first: two days into the 10th annual True/False Film Festival, Columbia, Missouri’s immensely likable documentary/hybrid-friendly showcase, the marquee title of the six films I’ve seen so far from the slate (three of which I saw before arriving) is Omar Mullick and Bassam Tariq’s These Birds Walk. The starting point is Abdul Sattar Edhi, a Pakistani humanitarian and founder of a number of shelters, rehab centers and other faculties for the dispossessed. As he washes naked runaway children, some pitifully scrawny, he says his philanthropic reputation and prominence mean nothing; to understand his work you have to understand common […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 4, 2013 -
True/False Film Festival
At the end of introducing their film Detropia at the 9th annual True/False Film Festival in Columbia, Mo., Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady directed compliments for the documentary festival at their peers. “It’s so great to hang out with all you filmmakers outside the environment of Sundance,” they noted, “which is kind of a pressure cooker.” SXSW got invoked even more; Janet Pierson’s name was frequently mentioned over the four days as directors swapped notes over their next stop there. It’s clear that True/False’s boons for festival-circuit-weary press and directors alike include the lack of film-affiliated publicists, barely visible industry […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 17, 2012 -
TRUE/FALSE 2012, PART ONE
Film festivals encourage connecting dots that don’t necessarily exist, a logical by-product of seeing four films a day. In covering this year’s installment of Columbia, Missouri’s True/False Film Festival (a lovely documentary festival whose actual atmosphere I’ll discuss in the next post), I’d like to accordingly divide the films into two broad categories. In the second post, I’ll talk about (very loosely/speciously categorized) personal, dewy stories of love; in this initial dispatch, I’d like to discuss films which look at lives regulated by top-down political decisions and climates. The most obvious example is Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s staggeringly well-controlled Abendland (“evening land”), […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 4, 2012 -
Robert Greene, Fake It So Real
Big-time professional wrestling has long been a lucrative business, but for the men of Lincolnton, North Carolina’s Millenium Wrestling Federation, the social cohesion and outlet for their imagination the sport provides is their primary compensation. As chronicled in director Robert Greene’s fantastic new documentary Fake It So Real, wrestling has never seemed as intense and physically costly. Yet Greene is not interested in mining the sport for tales of snake-bitten men reaching for a glory that will never come; this isn’t a doc version of The Wrestler. Woebegone men are few and far between in this world, despite the fact […]
by Brandon Harris on Jan 11, 2012 -
THE TRUE/FALSE FILM FESTIVAL 2011
There’s nothing like a parade to celebrate community spirit. When I arrived in Columbia, Missouri (aka CoMo) throngs of revelers in homemade costumes were marching down the main boulevard to kick off the 8th edition of the True/False Film Fest. The aptly named documentary festival ran from March 3-6, and community spirit was evident in the grassroots event dedicated to the audience experience. Columbia, a small city just north of the Ozarks, counts more than one quarter of its 108,000 residents as advanced degree holders. The University of Missouri (aka Mizzou) is the largest among several schools, and its prominent […]
by Rania Richardson on Mar 9, 2011 -
My 10 Favorite Festivals Of 2010
It was a grueling and exhilarating year. Last year from January to December I road-ripped in my van, the “Red Devil,” occasionally flew on airplanes, a few times rode on trains, sprinting across and around America, then over and around Europe, parachuting in on nearly 50 film festivals. It was a manic-depressive trip on the rollercoaster-roadway. One minute I was kissing the stars and the next I was eating asphalt. It was madness, but madness that made complete sense. To understand America today, non-fiction books are giving fewer and fewer clues. Literature has become passé for making sense out of […]
by Stewart Nusbaumer on Feb 4, 2011
