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.
Tag: true false
Inventory: True/False 2017-2024
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
2018:
Adriana’s Pact
America
American Animals
Bisbee ’17
Black Mother
Caniba
Combat Obscura
Crime + Punishment
Gabriel and the Mountain
Grace Jones: Bloodlight and Bami
Hale County This Morning, This Evening
Handsworth Songs (1987)
Kinshasa Makambo
La Flor de la Vida
Lovers of the Night
Makala
The Next Guardian
Of Fathers and Sons
Primas
Shakedown
Shirkers
Taming the Horse
The Task
Testament (1988)
The Family
The Rider
Three Identical Strangers
Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
* Ex Libris: The New York Public Library
* Faces Places
* Infinite Football
* Narcissister Organ Player
* A River Below
* Wormwood
2019:
Amazing Grace
American Factory
Apollo 11
Atman (1997)
Caballerango
Chinese Portrait
Cold Case Hammarskjöld
Finding Frances
The Game
The Grand Bizarre
The Hottest August
Island of the Hungry Ghosts
The Magic Life of V
Midnight Traveler
Mike Wallace is Here
Mr. Soul!
Now Something Is Slowly Changing
One Child Nation
Segunda Vez
Tanjuska and the 7 Devils (1993)
Treasure Island
Untitled Amazing Johnathan Documentary
Up the Mountain
* Aquarela
* Just Don’t Think I’ll Scream
* Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project
* What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire?
2020:
Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets
Boys State
Catskin
Collective
Crestone
Dick Johnson Is Dead
Dope is Death
The Faculties
The Giverny Document
Malni, towards the ocean, towards the shore
The Metamorphosis of Birds
The Mole Agent
Ridge
So Late So Soon
Some Kind of Heaven
Still/Here (2001)
Talking About Trees
That Cloud Never Left
Those That, at a Distance, Resemble Another
Time
The Viewing Booth
* The American Sector
* Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds
* In Transit (2015)
* Swimming Out Till the Sea Turns Blue
* This Is Not a Movie: Robert Fisk and the Politics of Truth
* The Truffle Hunters
2021:
All Light, Everywhere
Delphine’s Prayers
Faya Dayi
From the Wild Sea
The Grocer’s Son, the Mayor, the Village and the World
No Kings
Rock Bottom Riser
Songs that Flood the River
Summer of Soul
The Two Faces of a Bamileke Woman
This Rain Will Never Stop
Users
* Can’t Get You Out of My Head
* Gunda
* Her Socialist Smile
* In the Same Breath
* A Man and A Camera
* The Mole: Undercover in North Korea
* Radiograph of a Family
* Terra Femme
* Town Bloody Hall (1979)
2022:
2nd Chance
After Sherman
The Balcony Movie
Brotherhood
Canoa: A Shameful Memory (1976)
Children of the Mist
Dos Estaciones
Eventually
Fire of Love
I Didn’t See You There
It Runs in the Family
Last Days of August
Mija
No U-Turn
Octopus
Riotsville, U.S.A.
Sirens
The Territory
We Met in Virtual Reality
Where Are We Headed?
* Burial
* Il Buco
* Language of Birds
* Mutzenbacher
* Procession
* Rewind & Play
* Taming the Garden
* Topology of Sirens
* The United States of America
2023:
Anhell69
Art Talent Show
Bad Press
Bobi Wine
Crossing Voices
Dogwatch
Feet in Water, Head on Fire
Forms of Forgetting
Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project
Going Varsity in Mariachi
Hummingbirds
Last Things
Milisuthando
A Moment of Innocence (1996)
Moosa Lane
Our Body
Ramona
Three Women
Time Bomb Y2K
* All That Breathes
* The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft
* Reality
* Subject
* The Tuba Thieves
2024:
Agent of Happiness
Alien Island
As the Tide Comes In
Daughters
Girls State
Gwetto
Ibelin
Look Into My Eyes
Magic Mountain
The Other Profile
A Photographic Memory
Spermworld
Sr
There Was, There Was Not
Three Promises
Union
* Dahomey
* Flipside
* Menus Plaisirs – Les Troisgros
* The Night Visitors
* Pictures of Ghosts
* Ren Faire
Art Talent Show (2022, Tomás Bojar & Adéla Komrzý)
Not really a talent show, but admissions week at an art academy. A pretty enjoyable True/False doc. Vadim Rizov: “beautifully shot and consistently funny while observing a zone where inspiration and bullshit perpetually dwell side-by-side out of impossible-to-separate necessity.”
Look Into My Eyes (2024, Lana Wilson)
Rae Fitzgerald again, solo this time, and better suited for the Globe venue. No music during the psychic/medium sessions – was there any music at all? Some false leads and wrong guesses during the sessions, some spot-on apparent knowledge of strangers’ lives, and lots of affirmation – it’s posed as a form of counseling/therapy, for the mediums as well as their customers. Present, but uncaptured by DP Stephen Maing (who was down the street introducing Union) were the ghosts of beloved partners, children, a great(x5) grandfather, and a bearded dragon. Some humor but the crowd never laughing at the film’s participants, and breaking scenes to talk to the director/crew is left in, the cameras welcomed to the mystery. An A24 release so hopefully this will play out, and all the Everything Everwhere / Past Lives fans will watch it.
Scott Tobias in The Reveal:
Most admit that they’re improvising through uncertainty, working from an intuition that often betrays them. A cynic might consider them con artists. Wilson’s film frames them as seekers.
Daughters (2024, Angela Patton & Natalie Rae)
I’d read a little about this movie beforehand, and didn’t bring any kleenex, so stood outside the Missouri Theater staring up at its walls thinking “I am the brick, I am the mortar, I will not cry at the movie,” and this pretty much worked. Slyly highlights the broken horrors of the prison system through personal stories from inside and outside, the two sides meeting at the father-daughter dance, an invention of activist and co-director Patton. The dads are told to use the dance as a promise to change and be present for their families, and soon some are getting out but others are being shut away for decades (the movie never says why any of them are inside). A particular five year-old is so open, talking lovingly and often of her feather, then in postscript she’s eight, acting completely distant on a phone call with him. Older jaded kids have trouble with the concept, but give in when it’s dance time. A lovely movie that will go far unless it’s immediately dumped onto streaming and lost in the content ocean. At least twenty producers, and a production company that did Faya Dayi and The Territory. Opener Good Looks was a noisy four-piece rock group.
Girls State (2024, Jesse Moss & Amanda McBaine)
More wide-ranging than Boys State, the governor race not the only thing going. Conservative girl Emily is the star (has she mentioned she’s conservative?), decisively losing the governor race then quickly putting together an article about the differences in funding, prestige, and programming between Girls and Boys State, and winning a scholarship. Complaints in the air that the boys have triple the budget, participation from elected officials, and more discussion of real issues. Nisha doesn’t get a supreme court seat, so becomes the judge of a lower court that sends a case on forced pre-abortion counseling to the supreme, where Tochi is the DA arguing the state’s opinion while believing the opposite. It’s all super slick and heartwarming – they had so many cameras running. Production company Concordia worked on some of the big T/F titles: Time, Bisbee 17, Bloody Nose. We stayed for the Q&A, with three Missouri-based subjects in attendance. Rae Fitzgerald played too softly for a noisy noontime crowd, even with her rhythm section.
David Ehrlich in Indiewire:
The closer Girls State gets toward its climactic elections, the more it confronts the same patriarchal bias and performative empowerment that might have girl-bossed the life out of a lesser film (although this one still plays a particular Taylor Swift song over its end credits). And the more it confronts the role those phenomena manage to play on the university campus where the Boys and Girls State programs are being held at the same time for the first time in Missouri history (but still completely separate from one another in order to avoid sins of the flesh and whatnot), the more frighteningly it reflects a near-future — or now present — in which political agency is just something young women get to pretend they have if there’s room in the budget for a bit of make-believe.
A Photographic Memory (2024, Rachel Elizabeth Seed)
Good photography (by others) and music (by Mary Lattimore) but this falls straight into the personal/parents doc template with the usual outcomes. Mom died before Rachel was two, R doesn’t remember her, so she goes on a journey to find footage and associates. Goes where mom went, meets who she knew, makes mom’s ex-boyfriend cry while Rachel is breaking up with her own husband. I don’t feel like they came up with compelling way to turn their audiotape archives into cinema – re-enactments with faces hidden, video of tape machines, the old kachunk-slideshow from Sr. She performs as her mom, edits herself into film of her mom, interviews other girls who didn’t have moms, generally makes everything about herself and her loss. The stuff about the nature of photography and memory was more interesting than the parental pinings. Her dad seems cool anyway. Some good voices in this, but not the director’s, which is who we’re mostly hearing. When looking for trailers I found one from a decade ago – this was shot and kickstartered back then, and it took this long to finish. Somewhere in the long process it picked up producers who worked on Joonam, Hottest August, Aquarela, Her Smell, and Cameraperson, and the editors of Crip Camp and The Devil and Daniel Johnston. Horns and drums by Gora Gora Orkestar made the trip to the Jesse worthwhile.
Two by Michael Andrianaly
Gwetto (2023) and Todisoa and the Black Stones (2013)
“Economically disadvantaged,” they call themselves in Gwetto – true of both movies, though the displaced people of Todisoa are also geographically disadvantaged. They’re forcibly relocated by white exploiters who run a mine with local labor. A guy carrying charcoal to the next town inevitably reminds of the much more interesting Makala. Gwetto is car wash kids who are stressed that the neighbors think they’re thugs. Katy calls it impressionistic – we don’t get to know these guys individually. One bit of excitement outside a carnival where you can see people in the background clambering on the outside of the ferris wheels. Andrianaly won a T/F career award, but Katy and I are suddenly less interested in catching up with his Nofinofy.
Gwetto:
Alien Island (2023, Cristóbal Valenzuela)
I sat up front, enjoyed the opening drum, sax, and knob-twiddling from BSA Gold, and prepared to enjoy the film, which starts strong in sharp black and white then gradually lets me down. A worthwhile story framed as a protracted podcast mystery, withholding information so it can introduce twists, the interviewees frustratingly vague. Lot of archive footage including TV appearances by our participants on alien report shows. Ultimately when unknotted, it seems that Ernesto, who ran sound and acted for Ruiz in 1970, became a Pinochet supporter involved in the disappearance/murder of government critics. In the 1980s he gets into radio and invents a Friendship Island story, maybe playing different roles to expand the conspiracy, becomes friendly with some other radio people who’d planned to travel to the island but who turned back on the day of the Challenger explosion. The alien cult stories spread locally but nobody seems to have found (looked for?) the island. We see Ernesto in person, belatedly, and his funeral. The director previously made an art theft doc.
