True/False Film Fest 2024 turns its focus to the human paradox

Over the past 21 years, the True/False Film Fest has trafficked in the idea of thought-provoking paradoxes. The basic premise of a world-renowned nonfiction film festival that takes over a central Missouri college town sounds like it shouldn’t work, but year after year, True/False shows just how successful it can be. This year, the core theme of the festival was “The Human Paradox.” Everything on the fest’s slate of 31 new features and 25 shorts reckons with this idea in its own way. What does it mean when the place you call home no longer exists? How can a person lead a seemingly lonely life while crafting a robust, impactful life online? How can you honor the legacy of a fictional character if the actor who portrayed them doesn’t want to participate? How do you find hope in political systems that are stacked against you? These are just a few of the thorny, paradoxical questions with which this year’s best True/False films wrestle. While the films highlighted here are only a small sampling of what True/False had to offer in 2024, the fest continues shining as a beacon of hope for unique and exciting approaches in nonfiction filmmaking.

One of the shining examples of these paradoxes is Emily Mkrtichian’s film There Was, There Was Not, which tracks the lives of four women in Artsakh, a republic that has been subject to controversial land disputes between Armenia and Azerbaijan following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Artsakh eventually prevailed in a conflict with Azerbaijan thanks to Armenian support. The film tracks the daily lives of Sveta, a deminer; Siranush, a local political upstart; Gayane, an owner of a women’s centra; and Sose, a young judo champion with Olympic dreams. Over the final days of tentative peace, the film takes care to show the lives, families, and traditions these women built in Artsakh before it all abruptly ends with aggression from Azerbaijan to take the territory back in 2020.

The film is split cleanly between life before and after the attacks from Azerbaijan in 2020. While the pre-conflict scenes retain a comfortable, idyllic warmth, the aftermath carries a bleak sense of dread and worry. Families we previously saw playfully squabbling are now split apart, with children sent to stay with relatives to avoid the bombings from Azerbaijan. Women like Sveta and Gayan worry about when they will be able to see their children again and if it will ever be safe to return to their homeland. The best example of this dichotomy is Sose, whose life before was all about being the best at judo. We see her showing off her wall of medals and her stuffed bear, Mr. Bean, who she playfully brings along to her matches. In the aftermath, she has been conscripted into the military and sees the aggression threatening her homeland from the frontlines. Gone are her Olympic dreams and time with Mr. Bean. There Was, There Was Not offers an incredibly poignant look at an increasingly familiar kind of conflict. It puts a human face to the suffering we’ve seen in countries such as Ukraine and Palestine in recent years and captures the lasting effects of losing the place you once called home.

Further north, a small island off the coast of Denmark in the Danish Wadden Sea called Mandø is also in danger of no longer existing, albeit for much different reasons. In the darkly funny As the Tide Comes In, director Juan Palacios and co-director Sofie Husum Johannesen turn their focus to the Mandø’s 27 residents as they are impacted by climate change. Some of the film’s primary characters include Mie, Mandø’s oldest person, and Gregers, who has managed to leverage being the island’s youngest resident into a minor celebrity. In a way, the beautifully shot observations of oddball day-to-day life on the island feel like a cross between David Lynch’s idiosyncratic townies on Twin Peaks and a Danish nature documentary with a simmering undercurrent of environmental doom. One moment in the film sees a group of nonplussed older women deal with severe weather interrupting a game of bingo being conducted via radio. “Don’t worry, it’s just the wind” is a rejoinder many repeat throughout the film, as if the severe weather anomalies they face are completely normal. Another thread the film follows is Gregers’ futile search for companionship as the youngest resident on the island. After Gregers narrowly misses being cast on a TV dating program called Farmer Wants a Wife, we see him open Tinder as he wades through the water to hunt Mandø’s decreasing duck population, only to see that there are no potential matches for him in his area. It’s a funny visual juxtaposition that underscores what sort of damage has already been done to the island both environmentally and culturally. Even if he chooses to stay on the island, Gregers is the last of a dying breed who still remembers what life on Mandø was once like. If There Was, There Was Not is like watching a place be killed, As the Tide Comes In feels like watching a place die of natural causes. Each is heartbreaking in its own way.

Community and loss commingle in a much different way in director Benjamin Ree’s film Ibelin, which profiles Mats Steen. The young man from Norway was diagnosed with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, a degenerative muscular disorder that confined him to a wheelchair and eventually caused his death in his mid 20s. What Mats’ family found after he passed away is that, while he had limitations in the real world, he flourished in the online community of World of Warcraft through his avatar, Ibelin. Using in-game recreations based on character and chat logs, as well as interviews with the members of his guild, Starlight, Ree illustrates the surprising ways Mats impacted the lives of people he came to know through a game and, to a degree, was able to experience parts of life that he couldn’t in the real world. The film also explores the ways Mats struggled and pushed many of these people away during the later stages of his condition. While the film is a bit shaggy at times in terms of its pacing, it is nonetheless incredibly affecting in its message and quite entertaining as a film about the power of online communities.

Jazmin Jones’ debut feature, Seeking Mavis Beacon, takes a different look at identity in the digital world. In this film, Jones seeks to better understand the cultural footprint of Mavis Beacon, the fictional Black woman who taught an entire generation how to use a keyboard in the computer game Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. This quest leads Jones and collaborator/e-girl detective/cyber doula Olivia McKayla Ross to seek out the creators of the game and attempt to find Renée L’Espérance, who served as the model for the original version of the game and seemingly has no digital footprint. Seeking Mavis Beacon operates best when it finds Jones and Ross interrogating ideas around how white male developers have predominantly made AI assistants women, the impact of seeing a Black woman with three-inch acrylic nails on the package for a widely distributed piece of software, and the documentary ethics of seeking out a person who clearly does not want to be found. 

Amid these thorny ideas, Seeking Mavis Beacon also feels like one of the first documentary nonfiction films to successfully capture a Gen-Z sensibility in terms of production design. The film frequently makes use of memes, GIFs, and TikToks on a desktop screen to help illustrate ideas. The screen is akin to a canvas, allowing multiple pieces to coexist in a way that doesn’t necessarily make sense in a traditional film frame. On the whole, Seeking Mavis Beacon is brimming with personality and promise from Jones and Ross.

Where Seeking Mavis Beacon finds the filmmakers interrogating these big questions, Lana Wilson’s Look Into My Eyes focuses on people who offer answers from the great beyond. Wilson profiles a community of psychics all living in New York City, interspersing video of psychics conducting real sessions with clients with a look inside each of their lives. In exploring their lives and what called them to become psychics, common themes appear. As you might imagine, each psychic brings their own dose of personality, often coming from a background as a performer, citing trauma as a catalyst for honing their psychic sense, or seeing their psychic gift as a way to connect with people in an otherwise isolated world. In the same breath, Wilson also investigates what sorts of things clients are searching for when they visit a psychic, whether it’s closure about a loved one who has passed, healing trauma, or learning the fate of a beloved bearded dragon that has been rehomed. The incredible thing about Wilson’s film is the clear empathy toward everyone involved. There are spellbinding moments that come from sessions—psychics and clients truly connecting with each other and finding catharsis—as well as moments where their psychic senses aren’t exactly correct. Whether you believe in psychic abilities or not, Look Into My Eyes is a refreshingly unique take on nonfiction filmmaking.

Girls State (2023). Directed by Amanda McBaine & Jesse Moss.

Girls State (2023). Directed by Amanda McBaine & Jesse Moss.

One last highlight of this year’s slate of programming was Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss’ Girls State. In the follow up to their 2020 film, Boys State, the pair document the 2022 Missouri Girls State program, which took place on the campus of Lindenwood University in St. Charles. What makes this particular program notable is that it is the first time in 80 years that a Boys State and Girls State program took place on the same campus. Filmed just weeks before Roe v. Wade was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court, Girls State follows a handful of participants as they prepare to campaign for roles such as governor or representative. McBaine and Moss capture the ways in which the program can help young women better understand political systems and forge friendships in spite of differing perspectives. The experience also offers these girls a place to voice their feelings about issues such as the impending Roe decision, minimum mandatory sentences, or common sense gun laws. It may seem like an idealistic approach when set against our country’s complicated and divided political atmosphere, but it offers the same kind of hope for the future that Boys State did in 2020.

Amid these conversations about politics and campaigning, another key thread of Girls State is the participants realizing just how different the two programs are, whether that’s because of sexist rules that unfairly target girls or the significant discrepancy in funding between the two. Some could criticize Girls State for featuring a bit too much of the Boys State program happening on the same campus, but that’s more of a feature than a bug. It underscores just how important it is for the girls to have the same kind of space, resources, and respect that their counterparts receive. Girls State is a worthy sibling film to Boys State, with both standing together as an interesting political document of the past decade.