New Family Shorts (2017)
One of the Roughs, a Kosmos (Carmine Grimaldi) It was late… let’s see if I remember… a girl and her very beardy dad doing farm things on the farm. She climbs trees. There’s a laptop… and ducks. My...
View ArticleDid You Wonder Who Fired The Gun? (2017, Travis Wilkerson)
Travis, an ace photographer and committed activist, explores his own sordid family history, which only gets more shameful as he goes on, trying to atone for the crimes of his heritage by at least...
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Strong Island (2017, Yance Ford)
“You do not know your killer will make you out to be a monster. You do not realize that there will be no trial. You don’t know that 23 white people will decide no crime has even been committed.” A...
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LoveTrue (2016, Alma Har’el)
“If you love someone, you love them forever.” A movie about different kinds of love across the country. I picked this for Katy’s sake, figuring some love stories would be a nice break from films about...
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Still Tomorrow (2016, Fan Jian)
Great hook for a film – small town poet with cerebral palsy becomes famous online, her fame and newfound self-confidence shaking up her home life. We booked our True/False schedule based mostly on...
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Donkeyote (2017, Chico Pereira)
Manolo decides to travel from Spain with his loyal donkey Gorrión and hike the Trail of Tears in America. His daughter is supportive, but Manolo has had some health concerns, and it’s hard to find...
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Stranger In Paradise (2016, Guido Hendrikx)
We thought we’d already seen intense, slippery, ethically complex movies at True/False, and then this one came along, a hybrid documentary in which an actor (Valentijn Dhaenens, playing “Europe”)...
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Step (2017, Amanda Lipitz)
We closed True/False fest with a crowd-pleaser (literally, there was spontaneous mid-film applause) about high school step-dance teammates in their senior year. Can they overcome poverty challenges at...
View ArticlePeter and the Farm (2016, Tony Stone)
Peter works his own organic farm in Vermont, long abandoned by family. It’s at least the second doc I’ve seen about an artist/farmer – Peter was a painter and sculptor before a sawmill accident...
View ArticleWhose Streets? (2017, Sabaah Folayan)
The story of Brittany, who is an incredibly good shouter, and other Ferguson residents in the wake of the Michael Brown shooting. Somehow I got the impression from the description that this was...
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The Challenge (2016, Yuri Ancarani)
An extremely opulent desert version of the Eagle Huntress competition. Falcons are flown in (on planes), caravans of motorcycles and SUVs arrive, a jumbotron is assembled and participants watch from...
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The Next Guardian (2017, Arun Bhattarai & Dorottya Zurbó)
The first movie we saw at this year’s great True/False Fest was a pleasant enough way to begin, the fest’s first film from Bhutan, but it sounds like Lovers of the Night was the better monk film. Two...
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Primas (2017, Laura Bari)
After a pretty decent Thursday night at the festival, we plunged right into the deep end on Friday morning with this year’s True Life Fund film, a doc following two cousins who have survived terrible...
View ArticleKinshasa Makambo (2018, Dieudo Hamadi)
After a light opening scene, we’re suddenly plunged into a street protest that turns violent, in high-color, stuttery shaky-cam. The filmmaker follows protests against Congo’s presidential government...
View ArticleThe Task (2017, Leigh Ledare)
A movie which started life as a gallery exhibit, and was brought to True/False as a cruel prank to torment Katy, The Task consists of forty people in a room, speaking one at a time, at a conference...
View ArticleHale County This Morning, This Evening (2018, RaMell Ross)
The cutest onscreen text of the festival: “Now carrying twins, Boosie careth not about the film” was soon followed by the most startling: “Korbyn was buried in the early afternoon” Individual and...
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Makala (2017, Emmanuel Gras)
The most narratively straightforward film of the fest – it’s a process doc, showing a man at work, effort and result. It’s also the one movie we saw (until American Animals) that you could watch...
View ArticleCrime + Punishment (2018, Stephen Maing)
After Whose Streets and Kinshasa Makambo and so many others, it was hard to get used to the police being the good guys again. Fortunately, the majority of them are still portrayed as racist villains...
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Of Fathers and Sons (2017, Talal Derki)
At great personal risk, the director of this doc embedded himself with a jihadist family, allowing us to see how these people really live, to feel their personal struggles. Unfortunately, my feeling...
View ArticleHandsworth Songs (1987, John Akomfrah)
Our second Black Audio Film Collective film after Testament, this one a collage-style doc about the 1985 Handsworth riots – with at least one scene from the 1977 Handsworth riots, the country having...
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