Every year, the True/False Film Fest turns downtown Columbia, Missouri, into a destination for documentary film fans from across the globe. In this crucible for the latest exciting nonfiction films, themes and topics begin to bubble to the surface as audiences make their way through the festival program. What jumped out as a uniting theme among this year’s slate was the idea of looking to the past to make sense of our present situation, whether environmentally, politically, or culturally. With that in mind, here are some of the highlights from this year’s fest:
On the environmental front, one very strong example is director Eleanor Mortimer’s How Deep is Your Love, which had its world premiere at the fest. The film takes viewers aboard a research vessel with scientists who set out to explore a remote region of the deep ocean floor—days away from the nearest coast and 5,000 meters below the surface—to find and catalog previously undiscovered species. The real star of the show here is footage the robot ISIS transmits back from the ocean floor, which includes beautiful bioluminescent sea cucumbers, crinoids, and microscopic mollusks, among others, with names like the “Barbie Pig” and the “Psychedelic Elvis Worm.” Mortimer is not only able to use the breathtaking footage of the creatures themselves, but she’s also able to capture the sheer joy of scientists getting to see species that are thousands of years old for the first time. Some of the film’s most exciting moments come from the crew attempting to take samples of species from the ocean floor with a large robotic arm, including one sequence that is soundtracked to the Portishead song “Glory Box.”
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While all of this research is extremely exciting, and the scientists are taking great care with their work, Mortimer notes that much of this kind of research is being funded by corporations that are interested in deep sea mining for Manganese nodules, which contain materials used to make batteries. At one point the boat is boarded by Greenpeace as part of a protest against the practice, but the scientists don’t have much to say. It’s unlikely they would be able to fund their research without the mining bankroll. The tension between the parties feels reminiscent of many a sci-fi drama. It specifically brings to mind the Alien franchise, which sees researchers sent to a far-off planet, making once-in-a-lifetime discoveries, albeit in service of a corporation with more unsavory motives. Mortimer deftly weaves these threads together, alongside footage from an International Seabed Authority summit discussing deep sea mining regulation, to showcase the beauty of the research being conducted alongside the costs and potential harm that come with scientific innovation.
Another environmentally focused film that had its world premiere at True/False was director Sasha Wortzel’s River of Grass. Wortzel’s film focuses on the delicate ecosystem of the Florida Everglades, taking its name from both a book by Marjory Stoneman Douglas and a translation of the name the indigenous Miccosukee people used for the region. The film uses archival footage of Douglas, who passed away in 1998 at the age of 108, and documentary footage, alongside narrated passages from Douglas’ book, to tell the history of the region. Through them, Florida native Wortzel explores how human intervention, such as developing the Miami International Airport, damming Lake Okeechobee, burning sugarcane fields, and allowing chemical runoff into waterways, has led to a slew of environmental problems. Wortzel chooses to highlight this by profiling several different activists and the work they’re doing to try and protect the Everglades, as well as showing the impact these environmental issues have on key industries like fishing and agriculture. This approach is similar to Brett’s Story’s 2019 film, The Hottest August, and ultimately helps give Wortzel’s film a much more holistic view of these urgent environmental issues. To paraphrase what Douglas notes near the end of the film, change takes time, and while the problems facing the Everglades weren’t solved in her lifetime, there are still people who are taking up the mantle even in increasingly dire fights, and Wortzel’s film fits very comfortably in that lineage.
Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss’ film Middletown tackles environmental issues alongside the rapidly changing media landscape by profiling Fred Isseks, a high-school teacher in Middletown, New York, and the students from his Electronic English class in the 1990s. While his students were given free rein to make whatever projects they wanted, one group wound up uncovering a massive toxic dumping scandal. In 1991, Isseks first took students from his class to the town dump after hearing about it from a friend whose nearby farm was being negatively impacted by the landfill. From there, over six years, Isseks and his students interviewed anyone they could related to the story—including employees from the dump, city commissioners, “toxic avengers,” public officials, and a host of other colorful characters—for their school television program. Their work eventually snowballs into a thrilling project that attracts national media attention, implicating both local politicians and the mafia in this scandal.
Using a trove of archival footage from Isseks’ class to tell the story, alongside interviews with former students to fill in the blanks, was a refreshing change from McBaine and Moss’ typical style, whose previous two films, Girls State and Boys State, were more vérité, observational films. Since Middletown takes place in the early 1990s, and the video camera was a relatively new piece of technology for most folks, Isseks empowered his students to pickup the camera, be creative, and exercise what he termed as “civic courage,” which he describes as “behaving exactly as if you were a practicing citizen in a real democracy.” The film speaks to the power of having mentors in the education system and encouraging young people to find ways to hold truth to power, especially in our increasingly grim times.
Moving a little later into the ‘90s, but sticking with an archival approach, director Ian Bell’s WTO/99 had its world premiere at the festival. Bell uses immersive archival footage from journalists, protesters, and the police to show a portrait of the 1999 World Trade Organization protests that took place in Seattle. The event brought together people from across the political spectrum, united in a desire to keep jobs in America and fight for both environmental and worker protections. Things turned ugly within the first few hours though, when the riot police began using tear gas, pepper spray, and other anti-riot measures on non-violent protesters, and continued to escalate over the ensuing days of the 1999 WTO conference. While it’s easy to think we as a viewing public have become desensitized to depictions of police brutality on screen, the footage Bell unearths is shocking to watch. One particularly affecting moment sees riot police targeting residents of the Capitol Hill neighborhood who aren’t even close to the protest zone. Bell also takes care to drive home the point that everything this protest was fighting against, the idea that billionaires and corporations could potentially wield more power than the federal government, are deeply relevant in the current political moment.
Beyond environmental concerns, multiple films over the course of the weekend turned their lenses to our past and current media consumption, particularly critiquing and interrogating society’s obsession with true crime. The first, Charlie Shackleton’s Zodiac Killer Project, is an essay film wherein Shackleton narrates a film he intended to make based on the book The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge by Lyndon Lafferty. Original plans for the film fell through due to rights issues, but in telling viewers about Lafferty’s entertaining pursuit of George Russell Tucker, a man who he believed was the Zodiac Killer, Shackleton digresses into funny breakdowns of common tropes of the modern true-crime genre. This includes showing the opening credits sequences from many true-crime programs that feature many of the same stock elements, a heavy reliance on “evocative B-roll,” cliché descriptors from interview subjects, and a misguided sense of moralism that underpins the final act of many projects. Shackleton not only gets at the way that these sorts of projects have become ubiquitous in the pop cultural consciousness, but also explores why we as an audience, and he as a filmmaker, are so compelled by these types of stories. While the approach may not be for everyone (it relies heavily on voiceover narration played over footage that is intentionally not showing anything of note) it’s a fresh and funny take that has a lot to offer for both the genre’s fans and detractors.
The other film from the fest that digs into true crime storytelling is director David Osit’s Predators, which reflects on the popular mid-aughts NBC program To Catch a Predator and interrogates some of the ethical quandaries it created. Split into three parts, Osit’s film approaches the series from multiple angles, profiling actors who posed as the “decoys” on the program who were used to lure child predators into the show’s sting operations, a YouTuber who was inspired by the program to start performing his own vigilante child-predator stings, and an ethnographer who offers perspective on what it is that draws viewers to seeing predators get their comeuppance and the way To Catch a Predator dehumanized its subjects instead of giving them the help they desperately needed. In showing raw footage from the program and speaking to the people involved, Osit captures just how uncomfortably intimate and ghoulish the premise of the program was. This is especially true when he digs into the controversial episode where one of the targets died from suicide while an episode was being filmed, showing both the impact it had on the actor playing the decoy and the disturbing lack of impact it had on the police on the scene. This is further compounded when Osit witnesses a similar situation—this time with the copycat YouTuber. When a target ends up in a crisis situation during the YouTube sting operation, there are no actual resources or anyone to help this person, and the police are busy with more pressing matters. All of this speaks to the strange sense of justice viewers feel, especially those who were victims of child sexual abuse themselves, and the ongoing ethical gray areas as true-crime fanatics are emboldened to take justice into their own hands and wind up out of their depth. While not exactly an easy watch, it is undeniably compelling to watch Osit wrestle with these ethical questions and try to better understand both what he is looking for and what compels his audience toward this flavor of true crime.
While this is just a vertical slice of the programming from this year’s slate of True/False films, it’s clear that the fest remains a bastion for boundary-pushing creative nonfiction after 23 years, introducing audiences to new stories and ways of life challenging the way they interact with the world. I already can’t wait to see what they have in store for next year.
