Three years into attending the True/False Film Festival and I finally feel as though I’m getting my sea legs. The festival has been a crash course in nonfiction film: what’s new, what’s typical, what’s going to make me think, what’s going to get a crowd fired up. It feels good to consider a problem I’ve never come across before, to encounter the world through another’s eyes. I go to the movies to see something I’d otherwise never get to see, and True/False offers a unique distillation of that ethos.
The movies I saw at the festival this year all spoke to each other in interesting ways; many of them would make good double features with each other. Most of the films had an overarching throughline uniting them, too, a common thread of concern for humanity and the planet that shines through, even though it’s expressed a little differently from film to film. No matter whether they were documentations of protests or portraits of a place or deconstructions of beloved—and problematic—subgenres, the best films from True/False held a common belief: we’re all in this together, and we’re all we’ve got. How lucky we are that we get to be witnesses to the lives, work, fears, and cares of other people in this way.
Two tone poems about a disappearing way of life
Seeds (dir. Brittany Shyne)
Shyne’s film—which also played at Sundance this year—is a portrait of Black farmers in Mississippi. It’s almost a hangout movie, an opportunity to pull up alongside friends and family as they stop to rest and talk, to watch them work and play. I found the film to be peaceful, almost lulling, an open invitation to stop and just exist despite the pressures from the outside world. Shyne gives us that space to simply sit and watch, but her documentary isn’t entirely devoid of conflict. It’s just that the thing that threatens the subjects of Seeds most is indifference and lack of help from the government, which has failed to subsidize the work of these specific farmers the same way it’s supported the work and land of their white neighbors. They’ve been failed by the system. There’s no antidote to neglect except attention, and Shyne gives her subjects her utmost.
One of the many strengths of the film is its crisply beautiful black-and-white cinematography, which trades color for texture: the round curves of pecans nestled in a basket after being harvested, and the muscles of a woman cracking stray pecan nuts with her bare hands; the silvery flicker of flames in the undergrowth of a pine forest being cleared, the dusty fluff of cotton blowing in the wind as it’s being harvested. Shyne shows her subjects participating in the rhythms of everyday life, the comings and goings of family members, the way people who have known each other forever sit side-by-side instead of facing one another when they talk. I could have easily spent a few hours more in their presence.
Land with No Rider (dir. Tamar Lando)
Far to the west of the Mississippi River, Lando parks her camera amongst aging cowboys in the high desert of New Mexico. Land with No Rider is as laconic as its subjects, who tend cattle with one eye on a landscape that seems to be both ageless and in flux. More than one of them points out the mountains in the distance, where decades ago they’d been allowed to run their herds, but which they can no longer return to for fear of disrupting endangered species like the spotted owl, or for fear of drought or wild rivers. One cowboy tells us, almost offhand, about the ten days he’d spent on the wrong side of the river after a rainstorm, killing a cow and a deer to sustain himself until after the floodwaters receded far enough for him to cross again. He speaks of the episode almost like a minor inconvenience, one that he’d happily take over the other troubles he has to deal with: drought, dwindling herds, lack of funding and resources.
All of these men are in love with the land, unwilling to abandon the work despite their age; they crave the remoteness of the high desert. They’d tried cities and towns and found those places wanting. “I want to be free forever,” says one, and another tells us that after he dies, he wants to be cremated, loaded into shotgun shells, and shot into the mountains he loves so much. The beauty of the high desert is almost annihilating, and it’s easy to understand why these men have their identities wrapped up so tightly in their shifting environment. Lando’s camera dwells on the space with a hunger for its raw beauty. Horse legs scissor the morning mist, which burns off into pink sunsets over rocks and rivers. I’d want to be buried there, too.
Two portraits that skim the surface of complex situations
How to Build a Library (dirs. Christopher King and Maia Lekow)
This film is about two women named Shiro and Wachuka who win a grant to restore McMillan Library in downtown Nairobi—a library built by the British during their occupation of the country that still housed mostly books from the colonial period, and that had fallen into disrepair. The documentary follows the pair for eight years of their lives as they work to clean out the library and two additional branch locations, battling the decay of time, the ashes of colonialism, political niceties, the need to raise funding, an apparent indifference to the library from the local neighborhood—and, to a certain extent, the librarians themselves. Such a tangle of forces would be difficult to balance against each other; unfortunately, this film doesn’t manage to explore its complications in any depth. It’s frustrating to watch as Shiro and Wachuka enter the library with idealistic dreams about how to decolonize it. The work is worth it, but I never felt like I understood the full picture of the undertaking because the movie only skims the surface, unwilling to question the approach of its subjects.
It’s clear that the librarians who have been running the library for years have their own opinions about how things should be done, but the movie is incurious about the years between the departure of the British government and the appearance of Shiro and Wachuka. The film spends most of its time telling their side of the story while showing us only tiny glimpses of other perspectives; at one point, the two hold a meeting with the librarians and are unable to sustain a dialogue, to the point that all other attendees refuse to speak, and one of the librarians abruptly gets up and leaves the table without a word. The impression we get is one of great offense, but it’s unclear why he ever got up, or if it was even in response to something that had been said; for all we know, he could have been called away by a patron. The incident is never mentioned again, just one moment in a string of fascinating, brief encounters that hint at a much richer story to be told but that never have the chance to breathe or illuminate anything. How to Build a Library would be an intriguing portrait of well-intentioned people getting in way over their own heads, if it had managed to focus on the other inhabitants of the story who get pushed to the margins in the process.
John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office (dirs. Michael Almereyda and Courtney Stephens)
If you’ve ever considered dolphins to be one of the most intelligent species on earth, or if you’ve ever used a sensory deprivation tank, you’ve had your thinking influenced by John Lilly, however briefly. Those two thumbprints on the culture make for an eccentric Venn diagram, and that’s without bringing in Lilly’s extensive experimentation with mind-altering drugs, such as LSD and ketamine. This documentary skims Lilly’s life from student to behavioral scientist to purveyor of the weird, a man who believed that he could teach dolphins to speak but who also believed that language is a futile, imperfect endeavor. This documentary recounts the events in Lilly’s extraordinarily strange life almost as a list of facts, a Wikipedia page set to archival footage and photos that tells us about this strange man, but that does little to illuminate how, exactly, he became the person he was. We learn that he sampled LSD because he ran in a crowd that had it, after years of resistance to trying the drug, but we don’t exactly understand what caused him to change his mind about its use beyond a sort of stimulus-response. This echoes Lilly’s own experiments to try to teach dolphins to talk by forcing them to mimic the sounds humans make: a tall order that never seemed to have gotten beyond getting the animals to engage in basic mimicry. Lilly’s experiments literally and figuratively stuff dolphins and other cetaceans into a too-small box in their attempt to both elevate and control something that should never have been treated on such simple terms anyway. I felt myself straining at the boundaries of the documentary, too, hoping for a glimpse of insight into a man who likely would have resisted any simple explanation of his own psyche.
Two explorations of threatened ecosystems
River of Grass (dir. Sasha Wortzel)
Wortzel, who was born and raised in Florida, braids together different views of the Everglades in a shifting view of a disappearing ecosystem. Her approach is personal, expansive, and curious, tracing the history of American attempts to tame the ecosystem alongside activism by the likes of Marjory Stoneman Douglas (who popularized the term “river of grass” in her book of the same name) and contemporary Indigenous environmentalists. “She stole the phrase ‘River of grass,’” says Betty Osceola, a Miccosukee activist who leads prayer walks around the levee built to keep the waters of Lake Okeechobee from spilling their banks into the marshes of the Everglades every hurricane season. But water takes the shape of whatever’s containing it, and the levees and concrete barriers designed to keep the water out have done more harm than good, a solution that was designed to allow for the flow of commerce and air traffic, but not for the flourishing of life in Florida’s unique ecosystem. “Hurricanes can clean water, if water is allowed to flow,” we’re told, long after those waters were partially shackled by roadways and canals crisscrossing the peninsula.
River of Grass flows with the insistent force of water, picking up details about the land in a rising flood of information. Throughout, we’re treated to poetic descriptions of a rare place—one park ranger says the Everglades “whisper” their beauty to anyone who remains quiet and humble enough to listen, and Wortzel herself talks about “the heavy air like velvet” before a hurricane, the pressure front of “a cool sheet of air” that comes with an advancing storm along with “the feeling of something just about to break.” She interweaves her own meditations on the Everglades with excerpts from Marjory Stoneman Douglas’s writing, and with the thoughts of Miccosukee people who protect and care for their ancestral land. One of them tells us about the Everglades as a kind of chosen family, a refuge in the face of colonialism, and remarks that “chosen family is a survival strategy,” a way for people to evolve and learn, allowing the land to shape us rather than forcing the land to conform to a shape that might not fit it. Throughout, we see the Everglades through the seasons: piled high with debris in the aftermath of a hurricane, sawgrass waving gently against the sky, a blue corona framing the reflection of a full moon over rushing water. Our lives and land live in a tenuous state; all the more reason to respect and preserve what we have while we still have it.
How Deep Is Your Love (dir. Eleanor Mortimer)
Here, we embed with a group of Ph.D students who have won a grant to study a small section of the abyssal plain in the Pacific Ocean, so remote that it’s possible to spend weeks at a time without encountering another boat. Nineteen scientists, the ship’s crew, and Mortimer herself, a last-minute addition to the expedition. Mortimer tells us that the deep ocean has been left almost entirely unexplored—by humans, anyway. The expedition’s goal, according to their grant, is to map part of the ocean floor, searching for manganese nodules, trying to determine the environmental impact of deep-sea mining. But it’s hard to understand the impact of something without knowing what exactly that something even is, so most of these scientists are interested in the life that teems in the dark of the abyssal plain. Ninety percent of the animals on the ocean floor, says Mortimer, don’t even have names yet.
The documentary’s strength is in its deep-sea photography. “The only way for [deep-sea creatures and humans] to encounter each other physically is for one of them to be dead,” we’re told; the crushing pressure and temperature of the midnight zone would kill us, and the depressurization of coming up to the sunlit world would kill them. We simply can’t observe them without the aid of sophisticated robots and cameras built to withstand intense pressure. The scientists on the expedition spend their time in a dark command center, peering into live video feeds; most of them ask variations on the same question that human beings have been asking since time immemorial. “What is that?” “What the hell is that?” Our curiosity is what gave us the ability to build our own societies; it might also, Mortimer hints, be the one saving grace standing between us and the desire to tear apart the natural world for elemental resources.
It’s hard to draw conclusions when data is so scarce on the ground, which perhaps is why How Deep Is Your Love has a thin framing device: it’s presented as an act of mutual exploration between humans and deep-sea animals, both parties asking the perpetual “what is that?” question with no satisfying answers. Maybe there are no good answers because those take time; the ones we do get are wispy, just simple enough that any imaginative presentation of future substantial development comes across as magical realism, or worse, magical thinking.
Two angles on our relationship to crime and entertainment
Predators (dir. David Osit)
“At that moment, time stops. What you’re seeing is someone’s life end…and them realizing it,” explains ethnographer Mark de Rond while watching the confrontation that caps off an episode of the now-defunct TV show To Catch a Predator. In his documentary, Osit examines the rhythm of the show—how it started as an earnest if misguided attempt to educate parents about the dangers of their teenagers meeting strangers on the internet, and how it morphed into a sordid form of entertainment built on gawking at someone else’s shame. Osit traces a line from infotainment to reality TV, making a case for this specific mode of storytelling as a kind of anti-empathy machine. No consideration of the people on the other side of the camera as human beings, just boiled-down archetypes of heroes and monsters. No gray area, no room for nuance or understanding—or, crucially, grace. To Catch a Predator was canceled after its producers chased down a potential suspect to his own home, rather than waiting for the man to come to their decoy house. Their pursuit of a scoop ended with someone dying, a crime scene populated by police surveying the aftermath, one of them grinning about her front-seat view to a show instead of the tragedy it actually was.
The show spawned internet copycats: YouTubers who chase people down in grocery stores and entrap potential predators in motel rooms, their ethical boundaries even more tenuous than the already dubious morals of the original To Catch a Predator. Osit presents the show’s internet successors as a kind of entropy, a perversion of justice that makes the video camera and the editing room into judge and executioner, and us as viewers a willing and hungry jury, eager to dole out judgment to people we don’t want to think about as being human. Predators is a remarkable piece of work. It’s a thoughtful consideration of a live-wire issue, a call to thoughtfully step back. If we transform other human beings into monsters—no matter how bad their actions—then we’ve dehumanized ourselves in the process, too. It’s a sickening thought, and Osit looks at it carefully without flinching or offering easy answers.
Zodiac Killer Project (dir. Charlie Shackleton)
I didn’t expect this consideration of the Zodiac Killer—and, by extension, true crime documentaries—to be so playful. Shackleton had originally planned to make an adaptation of a book claiming to solve the Zodiac Killer case, but when the rights fell through, he pivoted. Instead of making a straight true crime documentary, Shackleton has made a deconstruction of the genre, going from location to location and telling us in voiceover what he would have done, had he made the movie he’d originally planned to make. The result is more interesting than typical entries in the genre. Each shot is a landscape: the parking lot where a California policeman allegedly encountered the Zodiac and lived to tell the tale, storefronts, streets, a fateful restaurant. There are no reenactors here: Shackleton instead pans the camera across each location, allowing us to populate the landscape with the players he describes. Each shot lands on some nondescript focal point, then zooms in, and while the camera zooms, Shackleton reads passages from Zodiac Killer accounts, commenting on how he’d have staged the reenactments, how he’d have framed the story, what kind of B-roll he would have used to make his point. The movie’s focus on the mundane helps to emphasize the ways that true crime is designed to stoke our fears, bringing us back to a poisoned well where ordinary cars and street corners can play host to monsters who may very well walk undetected among us. I don’t like the subgenre. It’s clear that Shackleton does, and it’s also clear that he understands its flaws, and wants to make an honest reckoning of it.
Three historical acts of protest
Deaf President Now! (dirs. Nyle DiMarco and Davis Guggenheim)
In 1988, Gallaudet University was poised to appoint a new president. There were three candidates: two who were Deaf, and one person who was hearing. There had never been a Deaf president in the school’s 124-year history, despite its status as the only college for the Deaf in the world. The board of trustees chose the hearing candidate over her more-qualified competitors. The student body revolted. Over the course of a single week, the students challenged their leadership, demanding to have a president who understood their lives and culture. They wanted a Deaf president.
Deaf President Now! is one of the most polished, rousing documentaries of the festival. There’s always a danger with documentaries of boiling down a story to its too-simple parts, presenting the players as heroes and villains. Here, it was gratifying to see a story about an actual moral victory over discrimination. We learn the story from the four students who spearheaded the protest, told in their own words, given through sign. It’s especially gratifying to see a story told through ASL and careful sound design; this is a documentary for hearing people, but it’s told intentionally from the perspective of Deaf subjects as an assertion of the rights of disabled people, rights that we take for granted, that were hard-fought, that could be taken away through ignorance. Deaf President Now! celebrates the achievements of the Gallaudet student body as a major step toward getting the Americans with Disabilities Act passed. A few years ago, it might have come and gone, a triumphant story about an issue that hearing people could feel good about. Now, it should also feel like a clarion cry and a warning. This can and will happen again. It’s our job to make sure that those hard-fought victories remain victories; if we don’t preserve them, they’ll slip away through negligence and inaction.
Middletown (dirs. Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss)
“I didn’t think of myself as a journalist. I thought of myself as a nuisance,” says one of the subjects of Middletown, remembering his time as a high school student in Fred Issek’s Electronic English class in the mid-1990s. McBaine and Moss, who are best known for their previous documentaries Boys State and Girls State, explore the reporting done by Issek’s class, which exposed the dumping of toxic waste into a landfill nearby, poisoning the groundwater. McBaine and Moss spend most of their time on the class itself—the students already did the reporting, so the movie gives us the broad strokes without feeling the need to re-investigate. Instead, the documentary is about how Issek nurtured students in his classroom, giving them an outlet for their disillusionment with the world, a place to express their curiosity, an opportunity to test out their own voices. We get to watch students learn how to assert themselves on camera; a few flirt with each other, teenagers trying out new ways of relating to the world before turning back to their investigation, asking out loud, “What the hell is that?” while zooming in on bubbling green puddles they find trespassing at the local dump.
In interviews, the adult versions of these teenagers look back on Mr. Issek’s class as their portal into becoming adults with agency, empowered to be active participants in their own lives and community in a way they might not have known was possible otherwise. In the end, exposing wrongdoing only serves to bring the illegal dumping to light; city and county officials are happy to apply a band-aid to the issue rather than accept any real culpability in the problem that Issek’s students exposed. Issek himself recognizes that he and his students were fighting a losing battle, but he tells us that his ultimate aim was to teach his students what he calls “civic courage—it means acting as if you live in a real democracy”—the implication being that the forces of entropy have already eroded away any rights that remain unspoken and unenforced by the governed. Middletown is really about lauding the moral courage of Issek’s class and their willingness to fight the losing battle, to refuse to accept the way things are as they way that things should be.
WTO/99 (dir. Ian Bell)
This remarkable film is an on-the-ground film history of the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle in late November and early December 1999, constructed entirely from archival footage—no voiceovers, no talking heads, just history captured by camcorders and newsreels. It’s a triumph of archival preservation and editing. At one point, early on, we watch footage taken by a protester of a policeman filming him back. The two wave at each other, and as they do, Bell switches perspective from protester to police. He’d managed to obtain both pieces of footage, a rare moment of human connection before the protests kick off in earnest, before the violence begins.
Bell captures a comprehensive portrait of the barricaded streets, the news reports attempting to smooth over any friction, the police training for conflict. The result is pretty damning for the city of Seattle; in one early moment, a cop walks up to a seated protestor, flips off their gas mask in one fluid motion, and proceeds to pepper spray them in the face, white streams of noxious fluid pouring down on bowed heads and backs. The powerful, armed with riot gear and rubber bullets and official news coverage, chase down the less-powerful, who for the most part are armed with nothing more than personal video cameras and signs and their own bodies. The protestors come from all sides: far-right conspiracy theorists, students, anarchists, ordinary people who want more transparency into globalization of trade. One man-on-the-street interview features a person who hadn’t been part of the protests originally, but who’d been so fed up with the violence that he simply sat down right where he was, in the middle of the street, and locked arms back-to-back with a small group of protestors, refusing to move. That kind of anger is galvanizing.
Bell’s documentary follows the flow of the week-long protest from beginning to end, pausing to note the shift in news coverage from on-a-pedestal reporting that favors minimal disruption to reports of police brutality, a change marked when the police begin indiscriminately roughing up reporters as well as protestors. Bell himself doesn’t offer any commentary here, but the cycle should be apparent to those who pay attention: it’s easy to hold yourself above the fray when you don’t have any skin in the game. Better to band together and tell the truth—even when it’s painful, even when it means facing impossible odds, even when winning isn’t really an option.
One repertory screening that knocked me over
Blue (1993, dir. Derek Jarman)
Each year at True/False, the recipient of the festival’s True Vision Award is given the opportunity to program a film that influenced their own filmmaking. This year’s recipient Hu Sanshou (director of Resurrection) chose Derek Jarman’s Blue, a single-frame meditation on AIDS, oblivion, loss, and the color blue. The film was screened in 35mm; form and function meet in unexpected ways, such as a moment when Jarman speaks about seeing floaters in his vision, a symptom of a detaching retina and one of the side effects of his own complications from the disease. Due to the print’s age, some sections of film featured heavier film grain, splashes of black freckles akin to Jarman’s experience of floaters in his own vision. Each reel begins with the chime of a meditation bell, a reminder that beginnings and endings are inextricably tied up within each other. I could think of no better way to end the festival than with the opportunity to sink so totally under the wave of another human being’s consciousness, to feel the ache of human life clinging to the edge of oblivion after being abandoned by the indifference of those in power. Jarman’s film hit me like a cleansing wave, and I’m still reeling from it.