For the 16th edition of True/False Film Fest, we screened the film The Commons. The film watches the righteous, diligent student-led activists protesting the Confederate monument Silent Sam at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The film purposefully restricts its perspective to the commons, the public space where journalists frequently limit their gaze, and captures how inadequate reporting distorts public understanding.

During the festival, we were approached by Courtney Staton, a UNC student-organizer and filmmaker, with serious ethical concerns about the film’s gaze and its filmmaking practices. In response, after the final screening of The Commons, True/False set aside our typical Q and A and instead asked filmmaker Eddie Martinez to facilitate a far-ranging conversation between Staton, who is black, and The Commons’ filmmakers/Chapel Hill residents Suki Hawley & Michael Galinsky, who are white.

Festival organizers approached Hawley & Galinsky, who willingly participated in a public conversation in which they took responsibility for their failings in communication and the fraught nature of recording civic action in a contested public space. Staton and a group of young documentary filmmakers of color compellingly critiqued the film for continuing a damaging history of surveillance of black people and people of color.

We support the screening of The Commons at this year’s festival. In our description of the film, we wrote, “The filmmakers build a convincing, transcendent elegy for the loss of civil public dialogue in society.” We regret suggesting an earlier time when a so-called civil discourse prevailed: we recognize that this appearance of civility masks and perpetuates the marginalization of dissenting voices. True/False is committed to convening multiple perspectives in the same room. In the society we seek to model, ideas are encouraged to collide, we hold on to discomfort without defensiveness, and we seek to center daring voices.

These unjust power dynamics around race, privilege, access, and representation are the foundational questions of storytelling and are ingrained in documentary history since its beginning. There is no such thing as objectivity in filmmaking. We believe that films relay the gaze of their creators and that all films are imperfect. Through our programming, we acknowledge that all films struggle with issues of representation.

We are committed to elevating films that engender robust debates, including ones on the ethics of representation. In presenting them, we expect viewers to engage critically. These questions are large and knotty, and exactly the ones we need to address personally, organizationally, and in the systems that frame and govern our communities.

Abby Sun, Amir George, Chris Boeckmann, and Paul Sturtz

True/False film programming team