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One word describes this year's True/False Film Festival in Columbia, Missouri: cold. Cinephiles who descended on the town for the annual celebration of documentary film were treated to sub-freezing temperatures and winds that made the air's bite feel even sharper. Such is the passion of True/False attendees, however, that such conditions did not dissuade them from queuing up on the sidewalk up to an hour before a film's screening time.
This year included a bumper crop of works that provide a deeper examination of familiar stories culled from the evening news. Happy Valley, the new feature from True Vision Award recipient Amir Bar-Lev, considers the child abuse perpetrated by Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky. However, the film is less concerned with Sandusky's crimes than with how the scandal devoured the legacy of head coach Joe Paterno and the university's football-centric culture. The Green Prince presents the remarkable story of Mosab Hassan Yousef. The son of a Hamas founder, Mosab was recruited as a double agent for Israel's state security service. The Green Prince is narrated by Mosab and his handler, who provide mirror-image viewpoints of an astonishing cloak-and-dagger tale.
The Notorious Mr. Bout profiles Russian arms smuggler Viktor Bout, a man called “the Merchant of Death.” The film sketches a portrait of smiling entrepreneur and war-abetting villain through interviews with Bout's family, friends, and adversaries. More ambiguous is Ukraine Is Not a Brothel, which details the feminist activist group FEMEN, known for their topless protests. The film attempts to suss out what motivates the protesters—and to find the mysterious individual who controls the organization. More ebullient fare is found in Particle Fever, which creates a scientific thriller from the search for the Higgs boson. The film's physicists evince an infectious passion as they work to plumb subatomic mysteries with the Large Hadron Collider.
The festival also featured several films that blur fact and fiction. The melancholy A Thousand Suns delves into the past by catching up with Magaya Niang, star of the iconic Senegalese film Touki Bouki. Richard Linklater's coming-of-age epic Boyhood might be fiction, but the director's use of the same actors over a 12-year shoot provides a glint of authenticity to the film. Stand Clear of the Closing Doors is also scripted, but by presenting an autistic boy's circuitous odyssey through the New York subway system, it vividly captures the city's pulse and people.
Forest of the Dancing Spirits and The Joycean Society each provide a window into little-seen worlds. The former pulls back the curtain on the Aka pygmies of the Congolese rainforest, while the latter sits in with a literary club that has been deconstructing James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake line by line for 28 years. Killing Time, meanwhile, provides a novel perspective on the death penalty by following the family of a convicted murder as his execution date approaches.
Another neglected viewpoint is placed front and center in Kaveh Bakhtiari's Stop-Over, which is this writer's pick for the festival's outstanding feature. The Swiss-Iranian director journeys to Athens to rendezvous with his cousin, an undocumented immigrant trapped in the Greece. There he finds (and films) a cadre of similarly marooned men, all sharing a basement apartment and searching desperately for an exit. The rawness of Bakhtiari's footage, the distinctive characters, and the painfully human drama make for an fantastic documentary experience that will hopefully attain a wider audience.
