True/False 2023 gets personal

After two decades of programming, the nonfiction film fest focuses on more personal stories that speak to much larger ideas.

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Over the past two decades, Columbia, Missouri’s True/False Film Fest has grown and flourished, each year offering a robust programming slate of both mainstream and more challenging nonfiction films. While in years past, many of the films at True/False have grappled with very big topics and grand concepts, such as the Church of Scientology or the Apollo 11 mission, this year’s slate of programming felt much more intimate and personal by comparison. Many of the films used smaller-scale stories, often with high personal stakes, as a way to speak to much larger ideas and topics.

One of the best examples from this year’s fest, which strives for that intensely personal connection between the audience and the subjects, is Silvia Del Carmen Castaños and Stefania Contreras’s Hummingbirds. The film is a portrait of Castaños and Contreas’ friendship and lives as young people in the border town of Laredo, Texas, where they spend their last summer together before going their separate ways. Their film focuses equally their activism for reproductive health, struggles with navigating the complexities of the American immigration system, and the healing power of making art to deal with past traumas, while also showcasing the joy they share as friends and trying to reconcile whether they want to stay in Laredo to make it a better place or move on to better opportunities.

Hummingbirds operates at its best when it leans into the unbridled joy of being young and aimless with your best friends by your side. As Contreras and Castaños wander the streets Laredo, occasionally defacing anti-choice yard signs, stealing shopping carts, or trespassing with varying success, I was reminded of coming-of-age films like Vera Chytilová’s Daisies or Augustine Frissel’s Never Goin’ Back, with a bit of Beavis and Butthead thrown in there for good measure. Hummingbirds offers a potent portrait of the struggles of growing up in a border town like Laredo, while still finding moments of joy in the fleeting transitional days of summer.

Another example of this kind of intimate nonfiction filmmaking is director Kit Vincent’s Red Herring. Upon learning he has a terminal brain tumor at age 24, Vincent picks up the camera to try and better understand how his parents, specifically his father Lawrence, are coping with and grieving his terminal diagnosis. Lawrence winds up on his own spiritual journey, converting to Judaism and tackling an ever-growing list of new hobbies, which include recording birds, learning how to grow medicinal marijuana at home, and finding ways to support Kit during the time they still have together.

While Lawrence is keen to get existential, Kit’s mother is less comfortable discussing the eventuality of losing her son. Similarly, Vincent’s girlfriend Isobel is uncomfortable with the notion of being included in Kit’s film and the questions that come from dwelling on his impending death. Where the film eventually settles is on Vincent trying to create and understand the legacy he will leave behind. Created with the knowledge that he has limited time left, the film has become part of his own grieving process, as well. (In a post-show Q&A, the director revealed that he still hasn’t managed to cry about his situation, but he does feel less isolated about it now that theaters full of people understand some of what it’s like.) While the description may sound dour and depressing, much like Kirsten Johnson’s film Dick Johnson is Dead, it keeps a very warm and funny tone throughout. Vincent’s relationship with his father gives the film a much-needed sense of humor, and composer Xav Clarke’s score keeps the film from getting bogged down by quiet meditations on death. Much like how Contreras and Castaños find catharsis in making art to deal with their trauma, Red Herring ultimately offers Vincent a chance to confront his own grieving process while capturing his legacy for everyone he will eventually leave behind.

While both Red Herring and Hummingbirds zero in on extremely intimate personal struggles, films like Art Talent Show and Going Varsity in Mariachi take a more character-based approach to capturing similarly high personal stakes by featuring whole ensembles of interesting subjects. Art Talent Show, directed by Adéla Komrzý and Tomáš Bojar, takes an observational approach to the selection process at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where prospective students apply to the studio they want to practice with, whether that’s painting, sculpture, or performance art. Though parts of the process seem silly to an outside observer, it is an incredibly high-stakes, high-pressure process for both the students applying and the professors trying to judge their work. Komrzý and Bojar take care to create capsule character portraits for the main professors, all of whom have very distinct looks and personalities that feel fully realized by the end of the film. We get limited time with many of the students, but hearing their answers to questions about their boundaries as artists or seeing their approach to tackling oblique prompts like “Passing Through the Bush” or “What I Dreamed Last Night” offer similarly succinct and often entertaining character portraits as well. This very observational approach recalls Claire Simon’s The Competition, about the premiere French film school La Fémis, but the ability to develop these concise characters within the ensemble ultimately makes the film engaging and entertaining.

In Going Varsity in Mariachi, directed by Alejandra Vasquez and Sam Osborn, the focus is on the highly competitive world of high school mariachi teams in the Rio Grande Valley region of Texas. The primary subjects of the film are members of Mariachi Oro from North Edinburg High School and their coach, Abel Acuna. Picking up with them for the 2021 season, their first since the COVID-19 lockdown, it’s clear that this historically successful team is in a transitional period. Acuna notes that many of the team members have never actually played or performed together before. From there, we get to meet a number of the members of Marichi Oro and understand what opportunities come from competitive mariachi teams, whether that’s camaraderie, connection with their heritage, or being able to afford going to college. These firmly defined stakes make it all the more nerve-wracking as we see that some team members aren’t as invested as others. The film succeeds at making these moments of hyperlocal high school drama feel consequential right from the start. We feel the sting when they miss and the exuberant highs when they succeed.

Taking hyperlocal stakes a step forward is Rebecca Landsberry-Baker and Joe Peeler’s film, Bad Press, which takes a look at how freedom of the press is not guaranteed to Native American tribes, as they are recognized as sovereign nations with their own defined rights. Bad Press tracks how the Muscogee (Creek) Nation repealed their 2015 Freedom of Press Act in a late-night, emergency session after Mvskoke Media reported on sexual harassment allegations against Chief Lucian Tiger III. Before this act was repealed, the Muscogee (Creek) Nation was one of only five of the 574 tribes in the United States that was guaranteed freedom of the press. In most cases, tribal governments can determine editorial decisions—and exact punishments—when the stories reporters cover could potentially paint the tribe, or their tribal government, in a less-than-positive light.

Landsberry-Baker and Peeler specifically focus on Angel Ellis, an indigenous reporter for Mvskoke Media, who makes it her mission to restore her tribe’s freedom of the press. The meat of the film follows Ellis and her cohorts at Mvskoke Media as they fight to prove the importance of public media that can hold tribal governments accountable against the backdrop of a contentious primary election for a new chief in 2019. The field of candidates, many of whom support amending press freedom to the tribal constitution, face off against the incumbent Tiger. Bad Press offers an empowering portrait of press freedom in a world where many are still inherently distrustful of the media. Much like Steve James’ in-depth docuseries City So Real, which profiled the 2019 Chicago mayoral race, Bad Press feels like a canary in the coal mine for the kinds of election shenanigans that would define the 2020 presidential election, especially when it comes to challenging an incumbent leader who is not keen on ceding power.

Personal stakes spiral wildly out of control in Brian Becker and Marley McDonald’s Time Bomb Y2K, an archival look at the origins of Y2K and Millennium Bug and how it became a national crisis in the late ‘90s. Time Bomb Y2K’s feels like a time-capsule representation of the late ‘90s, illustrating not only the initial very technical fears that computer scientists like Peter de Jager predicted, but also how fringe right-wing groups latched onto Y2K as a potential moment of unrest that they could use to their advantage. The examples of hysteria, panic, and distrust for greater systems that were on display ahead of Y2K feel all too familiar from the other side of the worst days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using news clips and interviews also allows for interesting pieces of context that show the political dominos being set up around people like Osama Bin Laden and Vladimir Putin, right as the world dodges the Y2K bullet. Time Bomb Y2K feels like exactly the kind of film a high school history teacher will eventually show their class as an enjoyable time capsule that sneakily teaches them about the many interconnected events and individuals who defined the turn of the last century. The HBO Documentary will no doubt spark lots of conversation among those who remember those fraught days when it eventually has a wide release.

While these films are just a small vertical slice of the exciting programming slate from this year’s fest, it’s clear that even after 20 years, True/False still has a very strong radar for the most exciting things happening in nonfiction filmmaking today. The documentary film fest remains a vibrant, one-of-a-kind event that brings some of the world's best storytelling to the region. 

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