Movies are a kind of time machine. You walk into a theater and you’re transported somewhere else—a parallel universe, another time, another place. By their very nature, movies collapse and dilate time, giving us entire lives and stories and people over the span of a few short hours.
Going to a film festival feels like traveling through several periods of time all at once. You arrive, settle in, dip into a new perspective, and reemerge from the theater only to go right back in again. Repeat multiple times a day, for several days. By the end of the fest, you’ll feel feral, unstuck in time; the real world keeps moving alongside you but it doesn’t really seem to exist, even in the moments between screenings.
The real world still insists upon itself anyway, especially at documentary film festivals like True/False. So many of the movies I saw at the festival this year were concerned with human perceptions of time, with memory, and with legacy. A few documentaries played with perception using formal filmmaking choices—a visualization of a protagonist’s mental state, for example, or the layering of archival and impressionistic footage to represent memory. A few poked at the boundaries of truth and reality, stretching our perception of what actually happened in order to express the truth as it feels, even if the actual events didn’t exactly happen that way. Time collapses to a point in these films, removing the perception of linear experience in favor of a model of time that doubles and triples back over itself. In a world where reality is warped by fascism and generative AI, telling imaginatively true stories about real people is especially important.
One of the cornerstones of this year’s festival was Remake, Ross McElwee’s follow-up to his 1985 breakout documentary Sherman’s March. The earlier film had been intended to trace the path of Union General William Tecumseh Sherman as he cut a swath across the South at the end of the American Civil War. We get traces of that history from McElwee, who showcases the rich, complicated textures of life in the American South through his subjects’ offhand comments, the way they toss off lines about what they believe to be inerrant and true. McElwee’s own loneliness—also a tossed-off incidental at first—insists on making itself known throughout the picture until eventually it becomes the entire point. He keeps making detours as he gets to know a half-dozen or so women, one by one, throughout his travels. Sherman’s March is a kind of ur-text of the documentary as personal essay, a pattern-setter for later documentarians like John Wilson and Sandi Tan to follow. Remake catches hold of McElwee’s present-day anxieties and refracts them through his ever-present handheld camera. Remake is ostensibly concerned with documenting the creative process of remaking Sherman’s March as a fiction film, though the movie swiftly moves on to other, more pressing matters.
As with the original, the inciting incident quickly falls away when McElwee’s attention turns toward the life and death of his son Adrian. “Something goes awry, off-script. You’re gone,” McElwee says to his son in voiceover; the documentary is a memory palace and mausoleum, layered with beautiful and painful memories. McElwee’s editing juxtaposes memories of Adrian as a small child, eager to speak to the camera, with footage Adrian shot as a young man in his mid-twenties, struggling with addiction and hoping to make it long enough to become a filmmaker himself. In the midst of an argument, McElwee hands his camera over to Adrian, literally and figuratively turning the lens on his own shortcomings as a father. The most affecting sequence intercuts McElwee’s archival footage of his young son with movers taking boxes and furniture out of his house, linking past and present to the body of work of a single man who doesn’t understand exactly where it all went wrong, but who understands that he failed his son, somehow, and who now only has his filmmaking ability to grapple with both the grief and the footage he’d taken. In one elegant shot, McElwee approaches a coffee shop from the street, filming his son through the giant plate-glass window as he works on his own computer. McElwee’s reflection layers over Adrian’s face, camera overlapping Adrian’s computer, two sad and broken men separated by time and death, only able to understand each other through an intermediated format, and even then, only imperfectly. The tragedy is caustic and painful and breathtaking; it hangs over my head for the rest of the festival.
The Oldest Person in the World (dir. Sam Green) takes a somewhat similar personal tack, albeit less successfully. It’s a self-conscious examination of Green’s own fears and anxieties, triggered in part by his own obsession with the fabulously old. When he learns that the oldest person in the world happens to live just a few subway stops away, he seeks her out. Interviewing her turns out to be difficult—she spends most of her time asleep—but spending time with her becomes a sort of catalyst for his filmmaking. The oldest person in the world rarely holds on to the title for long; very old people have a habit of passing away. Green makes a habit of catching up with the oldest person in the world’s successors, visiting each one, asking them the same questions. Some are sleepy, others hard of hearing; one lively woman from Jamaica named Violet tells stories about her elementary school English teacher who told her to “catch and hold” a poem, which she then proceeds to recite from memory more than 100 years after she’d first learned it. Green seems to enjoy collecting his old people, ruminating along with them about his search for the answer to a question that he’s never quite satisfied with. At one point he pauses to edit in a montage of flowers and water and human achievements, calling the sequence a “seventh-inning stretch,” a respite from the heaviness of the rest of the documentary. It feels as though he’s shying away, passing along responsibility to the elderly people in front of his camera; he concludes with footage of his young son running, and muses that perhaps his child could pick up the camera and carry on the project after he himself is gone, a kind of filmmaker’s inheritance that never questions the burden of expectation this might place on his own child.
The question of inheritance haunts Gatorville (dir. Freddie Gluck), a short about two children being raised on a gator farm in Colorado. Their parents care for 170-something gators that inhabit the natural hot spring on their land, alongside a menagerie of other reptiles and animals. Both children are homeschooled, a defense mechanism against being picked on by other children for living in an unusual setting. The older daughter is ambivalent about her lot; her younger sibling is more eager to please, less sure about his own preferences and identity just yet. “You’re not one person forever,” the older child tells us; the person she hopes to be remains a question mark beyond the horizon. Gatorville was programmed immediately before Nuisance Bear (dir. Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman), which follows a young polar bear trapped close to humanity by the lack of sea ice. Desperate for food, the bear turns to scavenging the garbage dumps near Churchill in Manitoba, the self-styled “Polar Bear Capital of the World.” Tourists flock to see the bears in their natural habitat, the film conscious of the fact that they’re encroaching into the bears’ territory, massive armored buses pushing into an increasingly warm and inhospitable tundra. When a bear is spotted, the tourists swarm the bus windows, clustering around tripods that balance telephoto lenses, the long gray cameras clicking and buzzing like a cloud of flies. Tourists are made to be like animals; the bear at the center of their attention is made out to be a little too human. In the film’s attempts to make the bear’s plight vivid, the film slips into anthropomorphization, presenting the bear’s curiosity as something that connects it to the human beings who are so interested in it, and framing the bear as almost unrepentant when it’s eventually caught and taken to “polar bear jail,” its head lowered while the bars slam shut. When the bear pushes further north into Nunavut, its fate is held equal with the Inuit townspeople whose lives are affected by climate change, too.
The children in School for Defectors (dir. Jeremy Workman, who made last year’s Secret Mall Apartment) are also affected by circumstances beyond their control. They attend a tiny boarding school in South Korea designed to help acclimate the children of defectors from North Korea to a democratic society. Academics are less important to the teachers than helping their charges become upright, kind participants in society, and the documentary is kind to its subjects, celebrating their triumphs and rooting for them as they seek to develop their own identities and understand the weight of the decisions their parents made. Even with the weight of that family history, School for Defectors skims the surface, choosing to stay light. Heavier and deeper is the approach in Leah Galant’s Landscapes of Memory, which chronicles her time studying the Holocaust and memory culture in Germany. Galant, a Jewish woman, wrestles with the level of importance layered on to one of history’s ugliest events; her family at home kept pre-Holocaust mementoes in a box labeled “unimportant documents,” while Germany continues to erect memorials to the victims of the Holocaust. Galant films the installation of a “stumbling stone” memorial and notes the presence of others around her city, including a pair commemorating a couple who fled to Palestine in the 1930s as antisemitism spread throughout Germany. She then draws a line from Germany’s memory culture to the country’s staunch support of the state of Israel, to the point of refusing to allow protests against the genocide in Gaza. Galant’s documentary questions the purpose of memory for memory’s sake: if German memory culture and penitence for the Holocaust leads to implicit support for another genocide mere decades later, than of what help is the memory, and of what use are the words?
If Landscapes of Memory is a meditation about the reverberating consequences of memory for memory’s sake, American Doctor (dir. Poh Si Teng) is a plainspoken, straightforward verité-style documentary that grapples with the conscious cultural decision to actively forget atrocity even as it’s being committed. The documentary follows three doctors as they prepare to return to Gaza as humanitarian volunteers, where they treat the sick and the wounded as bombs fall around them. They report that the number of wounded, mutilated, and murdered children alone is unconscionable. “You pixelate this, that’s journalistic malpractice,” says one of the doctors when Teng says she intends not to include the pictures he’s taken of dead Palestinian children. He’s angry, and for good reason: he took an oath to treat the sick and preserve life, his government supports the obliteration of life, and his fellow citizens would prefer not to even know about any of it. Teng’s film is just as angry as the doctors who serve as its subjects, deservedly so.
What Comes from Sitting in Silence? (dir. Sophie Schrago) is named for a pronouncement by its central protagonist, Judge Khatoon, a woman who founded a Sharia court in Mumbai. Her aim is to help women struggling in their marriages; she sees couples who cannot stop fighting, women who feel beleaguered by their in-laws, and people who are fed up and want to divorce, and she works to help them stay together or separate, whatever each case dictates. Schrago keeps her camera tucked away to the side of the tiny courtroom, a fly on the wall watching everything. Judge Khatoon listens as her clients plead their cases for themselves, urging the women to speak up, because to stay silent is to accept things as they are. Khatoon is a reassuring presence, even when I don’t understand or agree with her rulings; her aim is to repair the relationship, and Schrago keeps finding ways to underline the humanity of everyone who walks through Khatoon’s door. Khatoon sings while she’s waiting for clients; she urges feuding spouses to feed each other chocolate; and she demands that the men who have been taken to court grant their wives the respect they deserve, even when the husbands themselves seem like lost causes. She keeps a whiteboard tallying the numbers of all the cases she’s had—the number that resolved in divorce, the number that led to reconciliation. There’s no such thing as a lost cause, her practice says, but redemption only comes when it’s asked for. To stay silent is to let that hope die on the vine.
In Pinball (dir. Naveen Chaubal), Yusuf, the child of Iraqi refugees, is feeling his way into the American experiment; when he asks his father why his family chose to settle in “Kentucky, of all places,” it’s the complaint of someone who’s been forced to move with no say in his destination, but it’s also the complaint of every teenager who’s ever questioned their parents’ decisions. Yusuf is ambivalent about his adopted culture, uncertain about the American Dream. Pinball is a portrait of cultural and physical displacement, a character study interested in meeting its subject in the middle of his quiet dissatisfaction. That positioning can be occasionally frustrating—as an early twenty-something, Yusuf doesn’t seem to know quite what he wants besides not this, and the documentary is comfortable sitting in that discomfort with little to anchor it in place. The anchor points we do get are expressive flourishes: as Yusuf meditates to calm his anxious mind, we see him wading into the ocean near sunset, his head slipping under the pounding surf. Because the image is so divorced from his home in small-town Kentucky, it’s jarring. Only after Yusuf himself begins to assert his desires for his future does the choice make sense. The turn leads to a realignment of everything that came before, a sudden flash of understanding, a snapping into place—the kind of epiphany about place and belonging that most of us can only dream of having.
How to Clean a House in Ten Easy Steps (dir. Carolina Gonzalez Valencia) follows the same imaginative approach, albeit with more flights of fancy and more filmmaking techniques at its disposal. It feels like throwing multiple things at the wall to see what sticks; the documentary might have been served better if it had picked one technique and cooked it all the way through. Valencia uses the film to assemble an imagined portrait of her mother Beatriz, who’d moved to the United States from Colombia to work as a housecleaner. That much is true, but the documentary turns on a conceit that wonders what might have happened if Beatriz had written a bestselling book about her experience. It’s an interesting concept, one that would work better if the film trusted it enough to stand on its own. Instead, the documentary keeps switching techniques: an animated flashback, a staged interview, even a music video sequence. Each of the individual pieces are charming, but none of them quite cohere; it’s as though the film keeps trying on identities to see if another will fit better.
Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World (dir. Sasha Waters) is more expansive and cohesive. If you know Mary Oliver’s poetry, you know about her wild geese and her grasshoppers, the deceptively simple clarity of her language and the way she refuses to hide what her poems are about from the outset. This documentary is a standard biography, complete with slow zooms on black-and-white photos of the poet as a young woman, interspersed with talking heads who alternate between singing Oliver’s praises and reciting her poetry. Some of those talking heads are poets—former Poet Laureate of the United States Ada Limón makes an appearance—while others are cultural figures like Lucy Dacus and Stephen Colbert (who can’t get through “The Summer Day” without being reduced to tears). John Waters, who’d been a good friend of Oliver and her late partner Molly Cook, offers much-needed irreverence, without which the documentary might become hagiographic. It’s enamored of its subject, building itself to a climax structured around her most famous poem, “Wild Geese,” a portrait that’s perhaps a touch too neat for a poet who collected and arranged the imperfectness of nature into crystal clear lines.
“I’m a scribbler—I catch hold of what I’m given,” says Oliver, a line that coincidentally harmonizes with Violet from The Oldest Person in the World reciting a poem a teacher had told her to “catch hold” of decades before. The protagonist of Barbara Forever (dir. Brydie O’Connor) was also a scribbler—the groundbreaking lesbian experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer—who put everything about herself, including her own naked body, into her art. O’Connor attempts to sum up Hammer’s life, work, and legacy. Where her documentary excels is in its access to the footage shot by Barbara herself, who was prolific and joyfully enthusiastic about her art, which she viewed as inseparable from her sex life. The films she made were about her lovers and her exes, a way of preserving herself and her relationships at the moment they happened, a way to assert that she was once here, and a way to keep her memory alive long after she’s gone.
The documentary Seized (dir. Sharon Liese) takes the shape of a good old-fashioned revenge story, the kind set in a small town where interpersonal ties are tight and memories—and grudges—run long. Liese retells the story of the Marion County Record, a local newspaper that was raided in 2023 by the local sheriff’s office in a blatant abuse of judicial power. The raid sparked nationwide outrage, fueled by the fact that the paper’s co-owner and publisher, 98-year-old Joan Meyer, died of stress the day afterward. Her son Eric (the paper’s editor-in-chief) takes it upon himself to fight the abuse, and Liese’s documentary picks up the threads of the fight one year after the raids, just as the newspaper finds its own sense of equilibrium. Despite the consequences of the raid—and the First Amendment rights hanging in the balance of the ensuing court battle—Liese tells the story with a sense of humor, following the paper’s cub reporter around town as he adjusts to small-town life. The entire film feels a bit gossipy; the raid had been touched off by a petty feud between former best friends, the kind of bad blood that’s fun to dish about. (One of the talking heads in the documentary is given the title “ex-best friend” when we first meet her, a touch that made the entire audience in my screening roar.) Seized is the kind of documentary that has a clear arc and a definitive hero in the form of a scrappy free press, a fun ride with just enough bite to feel meaningful.
If Seized is a newspaper digest, Phenomena (dir. Josef Gatti) is a coffee table book, a respite from the heavier topics that pervade the rest of the festival. Gatti decided to make the film after gaining a newfound appreciation for science. His film, which is divided into ten brief chapters, feels surface-level, a primer on the building blocks of the universe. But what a primer! Each section of the film explores a different force of nature, from light to gravity to entropy, with every individual phenomenon illustrated in high-resolution photography in intense close-up. Gatti lovingly films soap bubbles, explosions of colored powder, and chemical reactions, showcasing each against alternating black and white backgrounds while electronic dance music plays. He isn’t interested in the intricacies of math, nor does he do much to explain the forces he’s showcasing—just enough for us to get the gist that the world around us is really neat, and that he’s found a cool way to demonstrate it.
In my favorite short of the festival, Division (dir. James Paul Dallas) chronicles a brief afternoon spent divvying up books. Dallas is in someone else’s apartment, sifting through the bookshelves of a friend, holding up his phone so that they can see the titles and make their choices. In 15 minutes, we hear stories about books and the circumstances that brought them to their owner; now, the owner must make difficult decisions from a distance about what to keep and what to cull. Dallas sounds like the world’s most supportive friend, the kind of person who will go to an ex’s apartment so that you don’t have to breathe the same air. Most of the documentary resides in the strange half-life of an amicable breakup, the kind where exes leave some of their belongings behind in each others’ apartments as mementoes. Only at the end do we come to understand: this isn’t a breakup, it’s exile. These books aren’t mementoes, they’re lifelines, being chosen for a long journey across an increasingly hostile border toward someone who may never get to return.
Division conveniently played before one of my favorite documentaries of the festival, Martina Matzkin and Gabriela Uassouf’s Cuidadoras (Care). Like so many other documentaries at this year’s festival, Cuidadoras spends its time in the company of old people. The film follows three transgender care workers—Maia, Yenifer, and Luciana—at a nursing home in Argentina, painting nails bright pink, making beds, spooning soup into elderly mouths. Matzkin and Uassouf watch life at the home with gentle curiosity, lending the residents the same care and respect offered to them by their caretakers, content to simply observe. Life in a nursing home has its own rhythms, grooves worn into ongoing daily life by the habits of old people. In one stolen shot, we see an elderly man and woman sitting in silence side-by-side in the sun on an outdoor bench, raising their cigarettes to their lips in tandem. The elderly men and women around them treat Maia, Yenifer, and Luciana with politeness, though they’re never quite certain what to do about their caretakers’ pronouns. Still, the residents and caretakers clearly love each other, with the residents dispensing advice about life and love and even sex. One of them tells Maia to get out of a bad relationship; another advises her caretaker that she “has to take care of [herself].” We don’t know how much love we’re capable of until it’s given to us, freely and without judgment. Cuidadoras gently showcases the exact kind of care that would be an honor to give and to receive.
Aanikoobijigan [ancestor/great-grandparent/great-grandchild] (dir. Adam and Zack Khalil) takes the same kind of care in showcasing the effort to restore First Nations ancestors back to the earth where they belong. The Khalil brothers intentionally choose not to show images of the remains of the deceased, pixelating and blurring them out of respect for their memory. They’ve been on display in museums and hidden in museum vaults—“prisons,” as the documentary calls them—for the consumption of colonial eyes for long enough. It’s a choice motivated by the same instinct that drives the filmmakers of American Doctor not to pixelate their own images: different times and circumstances, but the reality of genocide and history, both enabled by the actions of the American government, still rhyme. Aanikoobijigan sets out a model of time structured in a spiral, where past, present, and future can touch, and where the dead deserve the same dignity and consideration afforded to the living.
Powwow People (dir. Sky Hopinka) offers a snapshot of a single evening, roaming the grounds of a powwow in Seattle as the powwow season draws to a close. Many of the participants know each other (the MC takes opportunities to razz a few in between announcements). Hopinka’s camera circles the dance in a slow spiral, always on the move, never really stopping to rest on any one dancer. The rhythm takes some getting used to; Powwow People isn’t about showcasing any one dance. Instead, the documentary is about the feeling of being at a powwow, weaving in and out of focus, listening to the drummers and singers and catching sight of the sweat, observing the movement and regalia of the participants without trying to capture it in its entirety. The project is grounded firmly in the present moment, allowing the dancers to speak to their desire to preserve cultural memory and to continue to evolve into the future, without asking anyone to justify or explain their own presence or participation.
If most of the documentaries at the festival are weaving spirals, Tropical Park (dir. Hansel Porras Garcia) appears to be a straight line: a rare fictional narrative feature at the documentary film festival, filmed in a single take from a single vantage point. We watch from the back seat of a car as two middle-aged siblings get in, drive to a nearby park, engage in a driving lesson, then drive back. There and back again, a small journey through a corner of Miami, the kind of thing everyday people do all the time. For all its ordinary simplicity, the movie is also a feat of character building and improvisation: the more the siblings talk, the more we come to understand the fundamental differences and similarities between them. Lead actors Lola Bosch and Ariel Texidó do so much with their backs to the camera, and it all feels natural and earned. We might only get to see one angle of one afternoon of these fictional characters’ lives, but it’s still true and complex, a moment in time that I recognize and feel, deep in my gut. It’s a memory that doesn’t belong to me, but one that feels right and true all the same.