The following fifteen films are this year’s Gateway Selections. The thirty-dollar Gateway Packet allows its holders to reserve three film tickets from the Festival online in advance. As the T/F Box Office Page explains:
You can reserve tickets for three different screenings or multiple tickets for the same one; it’s up to you. You’ll get to select your films from a list compiled by our programmers especially for the Gateway. Not only do you get to reserve tickets before the box office opens to the general public, you’ll also be able to pick up your tickets during a “Gateway and Passholder Only” pick-up period on Thursday, March 1 from 9am-12pm. The Gateway does not come with pass privileges, such as the ability to pick up tickets for free at the box office or free admission via the Q. Gateway tickets cannot be exchanged at the box office.
Gateway packets go on sale at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, 2/22.
GATEWAY FILM SELECTIONS
Friday, March 2
6a. The Ambassador 7:00 p.m. at Jesse
38b.
V/H/S
10:00 p.m. at the Missouri Theatre
Saturday, March 3
19b.
The Island President
10:30 a.m. at Jesse
22b. Me @ The Zoo
12:30 p.m. at the Missouri Theatre
The music for this year’s festival has been announced, and things are looking rich, heavy, and good over on the True/False Music Page. More than thirty artists are coming to town (if they aren’t already here), and thanks to a very cool music player on the site, you can listen to what amounts to a several-hour mixtape of the musicians busking and performing for the festival, either to help you decide who you can’t afford to miss, or just to provide a fine soundtrack as you peel carrots for dinner. Note: Dubb Nubb, Jerusalem and the Starbaskets, and Dark Dark Dark seem to be especially good carrot-peeling music at this time. But decide for yourself.
Nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, buzz is building for Gypsy Davy, which has three screenings at this year’s True/False Film fest.
David Serva Jones was a damned good flamenco guitarist, especially for an American. He was also a serial heartbreaker who left wreckage in his wake, including a handful of children by various mothers. One of his estranged children, director Rachel Leah Jones, seeks to arrive at “Year Zero” with her dad after more than three decades by collecting emotional, unguarded testimonies from those who could feel him “strumming our pain with his fingers.” The wandering Mr. Jones makes for a powerful enigma: while mostly tight-lipped, he is an insightful man whose music is profoundly passionate, drawing on the guitar magic of his mentor, flamenco master Diego Del Gastor. Making clever use of shuffled chronologies, Gypsy Davy is an engrossing yarn, with director Jones’s deft, wry voice wrestling with one man’s hard-to-pin-down legacy.
One of the main attractions of the film, alongside the vexing and important questions of family history, is, of course, the music. Here’s a representative sample of Jones’s wonderful Flamenco guitar that saturates the film:
And a clip from Gypsy Davy itself, which also highlights the bizarre and evocative lyrics these songs often carry:
Jones’s daughter, the film’s director, writer, and behind-the-camera star, Rachel Leah Jones, will be on hand at all the True/False screenings to discuss her film. She’s an articulate and passionate filmmaker, and it will be a wonderful opportunity to hear her expand on her process and her personal struggle in making the film. She recently described her approach to nonfiction film in a Q&A for Indiewire:
I wanted to be a lawyer, at heart I’m an activist, and I ended up a filmmaker. Go figure. I also wanted to be a photographer, but ended up adding so many words to the pictures, at first in captions and then inside the prints, that I segued into film (had I been a lawyer I’d probably be a maniacal exhibitor of evidence and artifact). Image, word, sound, music—they just go so nicely together, and putting them together can be so nice. And narratives and the politics of representation and… that’s what making movies is about for me: creating meaning and asserting it and getting people to think and feel; never film for film’s sake, always in the interest of an agenda, usually subjective, always collective.
I don’t make documentaries because I believe in “reality” as such, but because I’m a sucker for its narrative impact—especially when it is “subjectively” rather than “objectively” told.
A glowing review continues this “true/false” thread, in Variety:
Much of this is “stranger than fiction,” all of it as engrossing as a flavorsome, twisty literary novel. [Gypsy Davy] is full of colorful personalities (especially the intelligent, headstrong women David had serial long-term involvements with while tomcatting on the side), as well as music — mostly casual performances in cafes and living rooms, but also some archival and recent concert excerpts….
The impact of [Jones's neglect as a father] has differed among his children, ranging from a flamenco-prodigy son to another, Marty Jones, who gave up a highly successful music career (as co-founder of rock group Counting Crows) because he feared repeating his father’s behavior.
I think we’re going overboard here—just go see the film!—but to round things out, here’s some more of Jones’s wonderfully rich back-story, from the East Bay Express:
David Serva is really David Jones, the son of retired U.C. Berkeley Political Science Professor Victor Jones. His lineage is white Alabama, not gypsy Andaluz. A graduate of Berkeley High, Jones left home at 15, played blues with local legend K.C. Douglas in a San Pablo avenue garage and folk music with his friends in cafes along Telegraph Avenue. A teenage runaway from the New England boarding school he briefly attended, Jones, according to his oldest friends, grew up fast from a shy, mumbling, bespectacled introvert who studied Latin (but who, to the amazement of his school chums, once beat up the local bully for terrorizing them), to become a streetwise, funkier California version of Holden Caulfield. He spent his 17th birthday in a Miami juvenile detention center, shortly before taking his first trip to Spain in 1959 to pursue his destiny as a flamenco guitarist. A star attraction in the flamenco room of San Francisco’s Spaghetti Factory in its heyday in the sixties, Serva was also the stage guitarist for the Broadway musical, Man of La Mancha, and played in a Greenwich Village cafe only a few blocks from where Bob Dylan was strumming the ballad of Gypsy Davy (no relation). David Jones had become David Serva, a prodigal Berkeley native son who successfully assimilated himself seven thousand miles away from home into the closed, clannish, and exotic world of gypsy flamencos.
This year, True/False is partnering with the University of Missouri to host the Based on a True Story Conference (affectionately known as “BOATS”), which will take place from February 29–March 2 at the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute (RJI) on the MU campus.
The conference is bringing an impressive group of documentary filmmakers, critics, and scholars to Columbia, including Andrea Meditch (executive producer of films including Man on Wire, Grizzly Man, and others), Betsy Sharkey (film critic for the Los Angeles Times, among many others), and Nathan Rabin (author and head writer of The Onion’s A.V. Club).
The full list of participants, as well as information about registration, is at the BOATS website.
The March March is the annual, (almost)-anything-goes parade that kicks off the True False Film Festival. At 5:30 p.m. on Friday, March 2, 2012, beginning at the Boone County Courthouse Square, the parade will rumble, trumpet, and clang down Ninth Street toward its terminus at the Missouri Theatre.
The parade is free to join: anyone and everyone is invited to make a costume, grab a few zithers and melodicas, and join the March. While you’re repairing your animatronic mega-baton, waiting semi-patiently for March 2 to arrive, you can RSVP for the parade on Facebook, read more about the March on the March March Page, or scroll through four zillion photos of the March March from years gone by on Flickr.
Victor Kossakovsky, the recipient of the 2012 True Vision Award, presented his “Ten Rules for Documentary Filmmaking” at the 2006 International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA) when he was teaching the festival’s annual master class. The rules have appeared in various guises around the web; in eager anticipation of Kossakovsky’s appearance in fewer than two weeks at the 2012 True/False Film Fest (along with the screening of two of his films, The Belovs and ¡Vivan Las Antipodes!), we’re reproducing the director’s ten rules below.
1. Don’t film if you can live without filming.
2. Don’t film if you want to say something—just say it or write it. Film only if you want to show something, or you want people to see something. This concerns both the film as a whole and every single shot within the film.
3. Don’t film, if you already knew your message before filming—just become a teacher. Don’t try to save the world. Don’t try to change the world. Better if your film will change you. Discover both the world and yourself whilst filming.
4. Don’t film something you just hate. Don’t film something you just love. Film when you aren’t sure if you hate it or love it. Doubts are crucial for making art. Film when you hate and love at the same time.
5. You need your brain both before and after filming, but don’t use your brain during filming. Just film using your instinct and intuition.
6. Try to not force people to repeat an action or words. Life is unrepeatable and unpredictable. Wait, look, feel, and be ready to film using your own way of filming. Remember that the very best films are unrepeatable. Remember that the very best films were based on unrepeatable shots. Remember that the very best shots capture unrepeatable moments of life with an unrepeatable way of filming.
7. Shots are the basis of cinema. Remember that cinema was invented as one single shot—documentary, by the way—without any story. Or story was just inside that shot. Shots must first and foremost provide the viewers with new impressions that they never had before.
8. Story is important for documentary, but perception is even more important. Think, first, what the viewers will feel while seeing your shots. Then, form a dramatic structure of your film using the changes to their feelings.
9. Documentary is the only art where every esthetical element almost always has ethical aspects and every ethical aspect can be used esthetically. Try to remain human, especially whilst editing your films. Maybe nice people should not make documentaries.
10. Don’t follow my rules. Find your own rules. There is always something that only you can film and nobody else.
Regular correspondent for truefalse.org and all-around Internet wizard Zac Early has put together a YouTube playlist of nearly thirty trailers for the 2012 T/F film lineup.
If one of this year’s films has something on YouTube, Zac found it:
We’ll be working our way through the trailers on the T/F Videos Page over the next two weeks in the countdown to March 1!
Bicycles are the easiest, healthiest, most fun, most life-affirming, and least-heinous way to get around True/False. To wit: the good people of PedNet Coalition have teamed up with the T/F to offer three tremendous bike-related services:
Bike Valet at the Missouri Theatre on Saturday and Sunday: free, secure, covered parking for your wheels.
Bike Spa: mini tune-ups for your bike (tires inflated, chain cleaned and lubed, frame washed) while you’re “taking in” a nonfiction film (also at the Missouri Theatre; small donation requested).
Bike Share: PedNet, True/False, and Walt’s Bicycle Fitness and Wilderness Co. have joined forces to offer a free Bike Share on Saturday and Sunday. Register at the Missouri Theatre Bike Share station, choose a bike, and off you go! Henceforth, you’re set up to take a bike when you need one, and return it when you’re done at any of the four Bike Share stations: Blue Note, Missouri Theatre, Ragtag, Jesse Hall. (Be sure to read all the details at the True/False Travel Page.)
Late-breaking announcement: The Fifth Annual Purple Cow Lip-Synching Competition—a fundraiser for the True Life Fund— will take place tonight, Thursday, February 9, at Hickman High School (1104 N. Providence Rd., Columbia, MO 65203) from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Students will compete against teachers in an evening of unforgettable performances. In the rich and varied history of the Purple Cow competition at Hickman, teacher groups have won twice and student groups have won twice. Who will prosper this year?
