Tag: true false

Deborah Stratman: Land, Birds, Circuit

September 24, 2025 by Brandon·Comments Off

O’er the Land (2009)

Military marching, war reenactments, an RV sales pitch, immigration cops, narration by a guy who ejected from a plane and bounced through a thunderstorm.

Guys who refer to machine guns as “freedom”
Firefighters, flamethrowers, waterwall

Wild birds in some kind of audio experiment
If i understand the credits, the archival-sounding stories were performances

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Ray’s Birds (2010)

Ray runs a raptor center – Stratman films his public demonstrations and splinters them into fragments.

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Hacked Circuit (2014)

The first voice we hear is someone getting a crank call from a flock of birds, so there are birds in all her movies. High-tech studio where a foley artist is recreating sounds from The Conversation. Our camera roving, invisible, goes into the studio and back outside in a loop, and jeez, that wasn’t a single take, was it? Michael Sicinski saw it at True/False.

The Klezmer Project (2023, Koch & Schachmann)

September 14, 2025 by Brandon·Comments Off

Listened to Cracow Klezmer Band at work, had a Czech lager, watched a klezmer movie – good day. Wedding videographer Leandro likes musician Paloma, fakes that he’s making a klezmer documentary to get her interest, then follows through, traveling from Argentina to Austria to Ukraine to Romania to Moldavia, chasing music that no longer exists in its origin lands (we hear plenty of performances but are told that technically they’re not klezmer, ha). It’s a true-falsey travelogue through folk tales and tunes, adding up to nothing much narratively but quite a lot cinematically.

Victor Covaci, Romania:

Morris Yang:

The Klezmer Project also incorporates a third, folkloric narrative in Yiddish voiceover, centered around Yankel, a gravedigger’s assistant, and Taibele, a rabbi’s daughter, as they face excommunication from their community over support for the heretical philosophy of Baruch Spinoza … The Klezmer Project meticulously subverts its structural expectations in service of a hybridized docu-fiction register, working best both as ethnomusicology and as meditation on its intrinsically whimsical and rewarding process.

Caro Diario (1993, Nanni Moretti)

September 9, 2025 by Brandon·Comments Off

Eclectic mix of good songs on the soundtrack, which is fortunate since we’re mostly following him tool around in his vespa and listening to music. It’s very False/True: half the movie is him/us just viewing the Italian scenery from the bike, but he finds time to stop for silliness (he gets insulted by Jennifer Beals, funny bit at Stromboli asking american tourists about soap opera developments). Moretti thinks he can literally coast through an entire feature on scenery, music and charm – and he’s right. Rosenbaum

Que Hacer (1970, Ruiz & Landau & Serrano)

September 8, 2025 by Brandon·Comments Off

I’m up to the “Left and Revolutionary Cinema” chapter of the Vogel book. Creating a fictional scenario around a real election with pop-up folk songs by Country Joe & The Fish – a Chilean Medium Cool, but not really visually or narratively interesting. Suzanne leans communist, her friends lean militant, they ask for her help kidnapping Balding Martin who has been following her around, but the plot goes bad due to a dirty informant and people get shot by the police.

Suzanne and her doomed commie conspirator friend:

Nice to have the DVD interview with Landau, who’s the source of the “CHILL-y-un” pronunciation. He says it was semi-improvised from a written framework with doc footage added, admits stealing from Brecht and Godard, doesn’t mention Medium Cool, though Landau and Wexler would codirect a film in Chile the following year so surely that came up. Balding Martin starred in Beware! The Blob the same year, popped up in minor roles in Hollywood pictures, just about everyone else showed up in the very early (and very late) Ruiz films. If the wikis can be believed, this played Cannes Director’s Fortnight with Emitai, Land of Silence and Darkness, Oshima’s Dear Summer Sister, The Death of Maria Malibran, and Emperor Tomato Ketchup.

Invention (2024, Courtney Stephens)

September 6, 2025 by Brandon·Comments Off

Feels like 10% doc, 90% light indie drama. There will be production noise (“cut… and that’s a wrap on Paul!”) in the blackout between scenes, puncturing the story of daughter Callie Hernandez following up on her late father’s inventions, interviewing friends/investors and other participants. But the actual documentary quantity is unknown, since people are playing version of themselves (others are played by fellow indie filmmakers), and the inventor dad was also real, playing himself in archival appearances on local TV. Courtney unpacks the precise true/false nature in a good Filmmaker interview, where they also discuss dads, “the mythology they have around themselves, and even fantasies about themselves, which as someone’s child you often enter because you’re very little, and it’s the way to be close to them and to love them.”

24 City (2008, Jia Zhang-Ke)

June 3, 2025 by Brandon·Comments Off

I struggle with Jia’s movies sometimes, but when they’re great, they are great. Catching up with his most major work I hadn’t yet seen in anticipation of Caught by the Tides, and it is major indeed. An interview doc with Chengdu former factory workers, but some of the interviews are being reenacted by actors. The woman talking about gaining inspiration from a Joan Chen movie… I think she’s Joan Chen.

Jake gets it. Neil analyzes further.

Sean Gilman: “Factory Leaving the Workers”

A Moment of Innocence (1996, Mohsen Makhmalbaf)

June 2, 2025 by Brandon·Comments Off

Re-enactments upon re-enactments! A decade after watching Kandahar, I’m on a new Kiarostami kick but still haven’t seen most of Makhmalbaf’s work. I’m assuming the meta-cinema ideas came from A.K. via Close-Up, though Makhmalbaf had made a semi-autobiographical feature before then, and a couple of cine-referential features since.

The online synopses say the director tracked down the policeman he’d stabbed as a teenager, but the movie opens with the policeman coming to Mohsen’s house. After a casting call the two men select their young selves, tell the young actors their own stories, then figure out how to stage the big event, leading to the big final freeze-frame which became the movie’s poster and original title (Bread and Flower).

Anhell69 (2022, Theo Montoya)

March 5, 2025 by Brandon·Comments Off

Self-portrait of the suicidal trans youth of a hopeless city, with sober narration from a coffin.

The director cast Camilo in his gay ghost dystopia film, but Camilo died, and half his friends followed, real ghosts in an actual dystopia.

Inventory: True/False 2017-2024

March 3, 2025 by Brandon·Comments Off

True/False Fest is happening now and we are skipping it for budgetary reasons. We discovered the fest in 2017 and faithfully attended (virtually in 2021) for eight years, with all the t-shirts and posters to prove it. Sure, I complained about the quality of films the last couple years and started making alternative “False/True” lists of movies that should’ve played the fest, but we’re always happy to be there in packed theaters, applauding movies destined for streaming which will never be seen on the big screen again, with their directors present for intros and Q&As, grabbing beers and pierogis and talking about pictures and stories instead of our regular lives for one long weekend. We’ll try to think of something to replace it this year, but in the meantime here’s a roundup of those years (not counting shorts, since this is already long enough).

2017:

Abacus: Small Enough to Jail
Brimstone & Glory
Casting JonBenet
Communion
Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?
Dina
Distant Constellation
Donkeyote
Gulistan, Land of Roses
HyperNormalization
I Am Not Your Negro
Lindy Lou, Juror Number 2
Long Strange Trip
LoveTrue
Manifesto
Mimi (2003)
Quest
Rat Film
Step
Still Tomorrow
Stranger in Paradise
Strong Island
The Challenge
The Graduation
The Grown-Ups
The Road Movie
Venus
Whose Streets?
* Austerlitz
* Dawson City: Frozen Time
* Escapes
* Fire at Sea