I first heard about True/False, an annual documentary film festival that takes place in the college town of Columbia, Missouri, through a film-maker friend some years ago. He described it as a documentary paradise of packed cinemas playing odd, interesting nonfiction films and a place where documentary, so often misunderstood as a pure educational tool, is reframed and celebrated as an art form.
To call a documentary festival True/False might seem a little obvious, but the themes of reportage and truth are part of Columbia’s identity (the University of Missouri houses one of the world’s oldest journalism schools). Formed 15 years ago by David Wilson and Paul Sturtz, who ran local microcinema the Ragtag and decided to start their own festival (the “co-conspirators” are so loved by the natives that giant, papier-mache sculptures of their heads are paraded down the street each year), True/False is also programmed by Chris Boeckmann and Abby Sun. Three of the four grew up in Columbia (with transplant Sturtz arriving more than 20 years ago, in 1995). Boeckmann is a homegrown talent who started as an intern at True/False at the age of 14, while Sun joined the team after studying at Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography Lab under Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, directors of acclaimed, woozily experimental fishing documentary Leviathan. Together, their inventive, risky programming is some of the most thoughtful I’ve seen at any festival.
Risky seems the right word, too, given that the festival takes place in the red state of Missouri. Columbia’s left-leaning voters make it a pocket of hope in Trump’s middle America, but even to a crowd of mostly white progressives, there’s no guarantee how these politically charged films (45% of them directed by women, and 33% by film-makers of colour) will play. Still, the almost midwest setting is part of its charm; volunteers drive shuttles for guests; buskers perform before each screening and pass around a hat for tips; a “Queen” in full Alice in Wonderland-style costume collects cinema tickets; there’s even a (rather raucous) live game show night called Gimme Truth!, where film-makers submit short films that the audience votes for as true or false. With its cast of characters and community atmosphere, at times it feels a bit like the self-contained universe of Twin Peaks.
As for the films, politics was an inevitable presence, particularly in Our New President, which film-maker Maxim Pozdorovkin described in a post-screening Q&A as “a factual film with no facts”. Made entirely of archive footage, it uses clips from state-run Russian news outlets and YouTube videos of Russian citizens sharing their views on Hillary Clinton and Trump to look at how conspiracies masquerade as news and how that news can spread like a virus.
Some of it is very funny (one YouTube clip shows someone reading Trump’s astrological birth chart), though by looking specifically at Russian propaganda, the film is able to avoid the hard work of implicating Americans too.
A film that did deal with complicity was Cristina Hanes’s António and Catarina, about a young woman (Catarina), played by Hanes, who forms an ambiguous relationship with a much older man she calls Antonio in Lisbon. She films their sexually charged conversations over a three-year period, at night time, creating a heightened, intimate space in which provocative exchanges can play out. Though Catarina tells Antonio she has a boyfriend, he asks her invasive questions about her sex life and insists she drives him mad with desire. It’s uncomfortable, but the suggestion is that she invites it, raising questions about the ethical line between film-maker and subject.
Themes of guilt and lineage were thrown up in the hugely compelling Bisbee ’17, directed by Robert Greene, film-maker in residence at the Missouri School of Journalism, which uses song, dance and re-enactment to resurrect the ghosts of resistance that haunt a tiny Arizona town unable to come to terms with its own dark history of racism, and in music video director, photographer and documentarian Khalik Allah’s Black Mother. Allah, who worked on Beyoncé’s Lemonade, has made a deeply personal, jazz-like portrait of his maternal grandfather’s Jamaica, using a combination of hi-8 video, mini-DV tapes, super 8mm and super 16mm film, to address ideas of identity and home.
The most brilliantly incongruous programme of films I saw was the festival’s Neither/Nor series, this year curated by London-born, New York-based writer and programmer Ashley Clark. It highlighted the docu-fiction created by Black Audio Film Collective, a movement funded by Channel 4 in Thatcher’s Britain of the 80s, and comprising artists such as John Akomfrah, Reece Auguiste and Trevor Mathison. It was bizarre to watch Handsworth Songs (1986), Testament (1988), Who Needs a Heart (1991) and Twilight City (1989) – all made for television in the UK – play to sold-out cinemas in Missouri, but audiences were rapt.
“Carrying the mantle of the Soviet avant garde”, as Auguiste put it, Black Audio Film Collective drew on the work of Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, Vertov and Kuleshov, all of whom skipped traditional film school. Of the four films screened, Auguiste’s furiously political, formally daring tone poem Twilight City was an eye-opening highlight, splicing first-person voiceover with winding images of London at dusk, and homoerotic tableaux vivants inspired by Nigerian photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode.
It’s this commitment to “creative nonfiction” – a term Boeckmann tells me they prefer to use over “documentary” (and indeed, two fiction films, including Chloe Zhao’s The Rider, played as part of this year’s lineup) – that feels genuinely groundbreaking. A more flexible definition of the form allows True/False to experiment with the ethical possibilities (and limits) of nonfiction film-making.
Five favourites
Black Mother
Khalik Allah’s mesmerising film travels to his maternal grandfather’s home in Jamaica, collaging his portrait photography with intimate audio testimonials on God, sex, marijuana and colonisation.
The Task
Leigh Ledare’s film playfully explores the ethics of documentary-making through this fascinating group therapy session that asks its diverse participants to consider the power dynamic between them, out loud.
Shakedown
Leilah Weinraub surveys the flow of money, sex and power in this dream-like foray into a black lesbian strip club in LA in the early 00s.
Bisbee ’17
Robert Greene’s haunting docu-fiction successfully uses re-enactment to recontextualise the unlawful deportation of striking workers in the copper mining town of Bisbee, Arizona 100 years ago.
Kinshasa Makambo
Dieudo Hamadi’s propulsive look at ways to resist, following three young activists in the Democratic Republic of Congo as they fight President Joseph Kabila on the frontline.
