The tenth True/False Film Fest is now less than two months away. In preparation, we asked you about your favorite films from the first nine years of True/False. You can find the first collection of personalized lists below, featuring a wide variety of picks. If you still want to contribute, write us at daniel.r.steffen@gmail.com and let us know your five favorites, along with a brief description of yourself and your favorite memory of the fest. You can find a complete list of films we’ve played here.
Leola Davis
27yr old California transplant. Baby tamer by day, punk rock hooligan by night. My interests include: YA novels, Music, fermented foods, and cats.
1) The Black Power Mixtape
2) Cat Dancers
3) Girls Rock!
4) Shut Up Little Man!
5) Man on Wire
One of my favorite memories of True/False would have to be during the 2008 year when Mucca Pazza burst into the Friday night action party and played a set in the middle of the stage. That took the party to a whole new level. They are to this date one of my favorite bands to come and play T/F!
Cory McCarter
I work at Ragtag Cinema. I like sewing, flicks, bikes ‘n’ stuff.
In no particular order:
It Felt Like a Kiss
Doc Ellis and the LSD No No
Disorder
Monkey Business
Waltz with Bashir
Memory: It’s a secret.
Chris Metzler
What I do: I’m a Missouri native transplanted to California. I also happen to be a documentary filmmaker who likes to explore offbeat subjects and just plain “weird” issues of contemporary America, plus I enjoy swimming in salty bodies of water and all things made of paper.
I attended T/F both as a presenting filmmaker with my doc, Plagues & Pleasures on the Salton Sea, and then came back to the festival later on as a ringleader and Q&A wrangler.
1) I Like Killing Flies
2) LSD A Go Go
3) Audience of One
4) Joy Division
5) Street Fight
Favorite memory of the Fest: Long lasting friendships with fellow filmmakers and filmgoers of course tops the list, but heck that’s not a memory that’s an ongoing experience. So my favorite memory is a tie. The smell of Ragtag popcorn still stirs my nose. But watching a great documentary with a brown bag lunch in a former livestock sale barn via the Reel Gone Round-up was a fun experience that can’t be topped.
Jamie Gonçalves
True/False Programming Asst., Gimme Truth and Great Wall.
1) Family Instinct
2) Running Stumbled
3) Waltz with Bashir
4) The Oath
5) Hula and Natan
Favorite memory: The first Q&A for Secret Screening Purple 2012 where the filmmakers dressed in disguises as to hide their ‘secret’ identities.
Sarah Haas
Film Festival Staff: True/False, Silverdocs, Citizen Jane, St. Louis International Film Festival.
1) The Interrupters
2) Last Train Home
3) No Impact Man
4) Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present
5) Waste Land
Phillip Overeem
I teach British literature and literacy seminar, as well as sponsor The Academy of Rock, the T/F Film Fest Youth Brigade, and KWPE 98.3 FM, as well as coach Science Olympiad at Hickman High School. I have taught for almost 30 years in order to finance my record collection.
In no particular order
:¡Vivan Las Antipodas!
The Black Power Mix Tape 1967-1975
Last Train Home
The Red Chapel
Blood Trail
Favorite memory of the Fest:Being part of the first T/F Hi Def Academy in 2012, a program T/F opened up for high school kids, and being interviewed with super-student Eli Byerly Duke by Voice of America (China) right after we walked out of AI WEI WEI: NEVER SORRY.
Annette Van
Annette teaches, sometimes successfully, at Central Methodist U.
1) Meaning of Robots
2) Disorder
3) Tie: The Interrupters and Gasland and Project Nim
4) The Invention of Dr. Nakamats
5) The Imposter
Favorite T/F Memory: Not a memory, but an activity . . . eavesdropping.
Nathan Truesdell
In no particular order:
Manda Bala
It Felt Like A Kiss
The Red Chapel
Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan: Supermasochist
Notes on the Other
Marty Nau
I completed MU undergrad in 2005, then graduated from MU med school in 2010. I’m now a psychiatry resident at NYU, interested in severe and persistent mental illness.
1) The King of Kong
2) I Think We’re Alone Now
3) Doc Ellis and the LSD No No
4) The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
5) We Live in Public
Favorite memory of the Fest: stumbling in at the last minute for King of Kong at the Forrest Theater via Q ticket, taking the last remaining seats in the dark, then when it’s time for the Q&A, realizing I was sitting next to Steve Wiebe the whole time.
Mimi Dolnick
I prefer documentaries that tell a story, as opposed to docs that are more abstract. Some movies, docs or fiction, are visually beautiful, but I am bored if I cannot get into the story and characters. I am a part time artist so this may be surprising. I also have worked in social service for many years.
1) Searching for Sugarman
2) Project Nim
3) Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry
4) Hula and Natan
5) Only the Young
I have a lot of nice memories of True/False and loved the overall festive atmosphere. Gimme Truth was super fun.
Jon Kelland
In chicago, of fargo, by way of minneapolis - pizza lover, doc enthusiast, unaccomplished filmmaker, youth worker, natural foods peddler [thanks, nick].
1) Secret Screening Purple
2) Disorder
3) Only the Young
4) Trash Out
5) Utopia in Four Movements
Favorite memory of the Fest: Not sure i’d say i have a favorite moment, just love the entirety of the fest: the buzz throughout town, talking to folks in various lines, the (almost universally) awesome energy of staff and volunteers, excitedly waiting for films to begin listening to (usually) great acts, and then having the opportunity to discuss the films with filmmakers and audience. special props to uprise/ragtag! It’s absurd how good this thing is.
Alfredo Mubarah
I had my first T/F experience this year. I have been in T/F fever ever since! I am passionate about arts and design, which landed me on my real estate career – I love architecture. And I love different lifestyles. So, it is no surprise that my number 1 film is The Queen of Versailles, a perfect combination of architecture (term loosely used here) and lifestyle (even more loosely here).
1) The Queen of Versailles
2) Undefeated
3) V/H/S
4) Me at the Zoo
5) Comic-Con Episode IV: a Fan’s Hope
Favorite memory of the Fest: I was so happy to be at the opening reception and then screening of Undefeated. That was one of my favorite moments at 2012 True False. I seriously am counting the days until the next one.
The Waiting Room was one of the most talked about films at T/F 2012, and in the months since the Fest the conversation has spread throughout the country. Following a successful run in the Bay Area and at NYC’s IFC Center, The Waiting Room has moved on to D.C., Sacramento and Boston with more cities soon to follow. And the film will be returning to Columbia for two nights only on December 12th and 13th at Ragtag Cinema.
The Waiting Roomis and ought to be an important part of the ongoing discussion about health care reform in America. The film observes a single day in the overcrowded emergency room of Highland Hospital of Oakland, where desperate uninsured patients wait for countless hours in hopes of seeing a doctor. A welcome reprieve from the pontificating of experts and politicos, The Waiting Room offers no solutions. But, as Stephen Holden of the New York Times notes ”by removing any editorial screen, it confronts you head-on with human suffering that a more humane and equitable system might help alleviate”. In the words of Rick Ayers of The Huffington Post, it is “a punch to the gut, an unblinking gaze at the real lives of people cast off and left out of the medical system in the U.S.” The film also carefully tracks the Herculean labors of the Highland Hospital staff, who act with patience, humor and courage in the face of unending frustration. The final result is, as Mick LaSalle of The San Francisco Chronicle observes, ”human drama at its most intense and universal”.
Director Peter Nicks spoke with The PBS Newshour about the stories that inspired him to make the film, and Highland as an institution torn between providing emergency and primary care. The segment also includes clips from the film.
Nicks also sat down with SundanceNOW in our 2012 filmmaker lounge. He explained some of the challenges of an on the fly style of documentary filmmaking, and his film’s affinity with another T/F hit, Last Train Home (T/F 2010).
The Waiting Room was created alongside The Storytelling Project, an interactive social media platform which allows patients to share their hopes and fears during those long wasted hours in the waiting room. In this sample a father explains the ordeal involved in obtaining life saving insulin for his wife.
The Waiting Room is above all else a powerful immersive experience. We recommend that you do not pass on the opportunity to see it projected on a big screen. There are only two chances in Columbia on December 12 and 13 at Ragtag Cinema. Elsewhere you catch the film at:
The sixth installment of DocuMemories takes place this Monday, November 26th at Ragtag Cinema. This time we feature one of the most bizarre films ever to screen at True/False.
Family Instinct (T/F 2011) takes us to rural Latvia where Zanda anxiously awaits the release from prison of the man who is both her brother and the father of her children. In the interim she plays host to a motley assortment of tenants and neighbors who unleash a melee of drunken debauchery in her home. The staggering details are captured by virtuoso sound and camera work that seems too good to be true. Balanced perilously between tragedy and comedy, truth and fiction, art and exploitation, Family Instinct is a film not soon forgotten.
Prior to the film’s New York premiere director Andris Gauja spoke with Lela Scott MacNeil of Rooftop Films. Gauja cited the films of Lars Von Trier and Harmony Korine’s Gummo as important forerunners. He also explained a paradox of human life that he regards as the film’s core.
Rooftop Films: Describe the film for someone who hasn’t seen it.
Andris Gauja: At the first glance, it may look like a film about social issues – incest, alcoholism and poverty. But it is actually not about that. To me, it’s just a setting for a more general, more universal theme, it’s about a paradox that refers to everybody – our being trapped in our small ’social circle’, a ‘bubble’ that we live our lives in, and we would probably want to change our lives, fulfill our dreams, but it’s so hard to get out of our micro society we’re so used to be in. At the same time, I do not believe that the most part of audience will catch this message, most of people will probably watch this as ‘one of the most insane documentaries’ they have seen. But if the viewer is capable of identifying with the characters at least a little bit, I will be happy about it.
Gauja also spoke in-depth with Paul Sbrizzi of Hammer to Nail, but we’d recommend you see the film before reading this fascinating interview. You shouldn’t spoil even one of the astounding events that await you.
Tickets to DocuMemories are:
$8.50 for the general public.
$5 for Ragtag members and all T/F volunteers; if you’ve ever volunteered for T/F 2003-2012, dig out your volunteer pass and present it at the box office to receive the member discounted admission price of $5 for all films in the series (you must present your pass, sorry but there are thousands of you out there and we need some way to recognize your contribution to receive the discount)
FREE for current Guffman members and T/F 2013 Super Circle Passholders.
FREE on a space available basis for Ragtag, Uprise, 9th Street Video and T/F 2012-2013 Core Staff employees.
IDFA, the world’s biggest and most prestigious documentary film festival, is now underway in Amsterdam. IDFA has always been an important event on the True/False calendar, responsible for significant discoveries such as Last Train Home, Burma VJ, Afghan Star and Family Instinct. This year T/F co-director Paul Sturtz and associate programmer Chris Boeckmann have made the journey to the Netherlands in search of powerful new films for T/F 2013.
Every year IDFA selects a master filmmaker to present his or her documentary “Top Ten”, a set of important films that have informed their work and continue to reward repeat viewings. These films are shown at special screenings during the festival. This year the honor has gone to Victor Kossakovsky, the Russian auteur who also received our 2012 True Vision Award.
Kossakovsky presented his earliest and most recent features at T/F 2012. This was a rare treat for an American audience, as Kossakovsky’s films are shamefully still unavailable in the US. His first film, The Belovs (1993), places us alongside an elderly brother and sister living together in rural poverty, their lives punctuated by intense pain and joy.
His new film is ¡Vivan Las Antipodas!, a whimsical and mind-bending trek around the planet to compare existence at points exactly opposite one another on the globe.
For those of us who couldn’t make the trip to Amsterdam, but want to dig deeper in the history of documentary, there is good news. Half of Kossakovsky’s Top Ten selections are available online.
His list begins with two early masterworks. The first is Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (Russia, 1929), recently declared to be one of the ten greatest films ever by Sight and Sound’s critics poll. Vertov was a Soviet film theorist who maintained that the Russian Revolution required a new revolutionary cinema, one completely divorced from what he regarded as the pernicious influence of literature and the theater. Man with a Movie Camera is the fullest expression of this vision; it has no story, but employs a dazzling array of editing techniques to present a true symphony of a city. The film is available online with an excellent new soundtrack from The Alloy Orchestra created from Vertov’s notes.
The second early feature is Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran (England, 1934), a stunning ethnographic study of life on the Aran Islands off of the West Coast of Ireland. Flaherty’s films have been described as “docudramas” or “ethnofictions” because of his willingness to stage scenes and even reconstruct cultural practices no longer in existence at the time of filming. In the case of Man of Aran the shark hunting techniques the islanders employ in the film had not been in use for over 50 years.
Interestingly, Kossakovsky selected two similar short films. In both we study the faces of people who are themselves studying a particular piece of art. In the first, Pavel Kogan’s Look at Her Face (Russia, 1968), a tour guide introduces museum goers to Da Vinci’s famous painting Madonna and Child, and hidden cameras capture a diverse and fascinating range of reactions.
In the second, Herz Frank’s Ten Minutes Older (Latvia, 1978), the frame gracefully dances across the faces of young children enthralled by a puppet show. In contrast to the primarily natural sound of the previous film, Ten Minutes Older features a bold orchestral score, which helps to powerfully evoke the transporting nature of the arts.
The final film available online is Artavazd Pelechian’s Seasons of the Year (Armenia, 1975), an eloquent visual poem on the complex relationship between nature and humanity in an isolated mountain community. In a mere 29 minutes the film covers the cycle of an entire year. The unorthodox soundtrack combines Vivaldi with traditional Armenian folk music.
You’ll have to track down the remainder of Kossakovsky’s Top Ten elsewhere. They are: The Tram Runs Through the City (Ludmila Stanukinas, Russia, 1973), Our Mama is a Hero (Nikolai Obukhovich, Russia, 1979), Spiritual Voices (Alexander Sukharov, Russia, 1995), Workingman’s Death (Michael Glawogger, Germany/Austria, 2005) and Position Among the Stars (Leonard Retel Helmrich, The Netherlands, 2010).
Six years ago, at IDFA 2006, Kossakovsky presented another list of 10, his provocative Ten Rules for Documentary Filmmaking. The list, reprinted below, is still much discussed and still much worth discussing.
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.
Kossakovsky explained each of these rules at length, as well as presenting clips from his films, in a ten part masterclass at the festival.
Finally, for a small sample of Victor’s own work, check out his recently released New York Times Op-Doc. The short film LULLABY spies into a growing phenomenon in Europe, homeless men and women sleeping inside banks near 24 hour ATMs. The film is part of the Why Poverty? initiative, which uses films to encourage conversations about poverty.
Election day is finally here as our long campaign season draws to a close. If you’re back from the polls and looking to fill the void left by the missing the attack ads, some electoral cinema may be just the ticket.
Filmmakers have been aiming their cameras at the gears of our democracy for a long time now, creating some of the most important works in the history of documentary. First and foremost is Robert Drew’s Primary (1960), a groundbreaking film that launched the American Direct Cinema movement. Primary hits the road alongside Democratic presidential candidates John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphery as they travel from rally to rally, grinding out the late winter of 1960 in the closely contested state of Wisconsin. Taking advantage of new technologies in lightweight cameras and synchronized sound, Primary observes the speeches and hand shakes up close, creating the intimacy Richard Leacock famously called “the feeling of being there”.
Primary was created by a Direct Cinema dream team. Director Robert Drew’s collaborators included Albert and David Maysles, Richard Leacock and D. A. Pennebaker, who all went on to become legends in their own rights. Decades later, Pennebaker, alongside co-director Chris Hegedus, plunged even deeper into the nitty-gritty of our politics with The War Room (1993). Denied direct access to then candidate Bill Clinton, the filmmakers found their stars in his campaign managers, the charismatic “Ragin’ Cajun” James Carville and the enthusiastic George Stephanopoulos. The War Room peeks into their messy backrooms over the entire course of the 1992 presidential campaign. As the frantic staff improvises the latest talking points and agonizes over new poll numbers, the film becomes surprisingly suspenseful, despite our knowing the outcome. You can check out The War Room on Hulu Plus as part of their content from The Criterion Collection.
POV is sharing an excellent film clearly in the Direct Cinema tradition of Primary and The War Room. R.J. Cutler and David Van Taylor’s A Perfect Candidate (1996) follows Oliver North during his 1994 bid for the U.S. senate seat from Virginia, a mere seven years after he admitted to “misleading” Congress during the Iran-Contra affair. From the gun range to the pulpit, Ollie and his team seek the moral high ground against his scandal laden opponent Charles Robb. The results are both amusing and disturbing, as voters are left, in one man’s poignant words, with a choice between two diseases.
Finally, if you think national politics gets ugly, have we got a story for you. Director Marshall Curry narrates Street Fight (T/F 2006), a true David and Goliath tale. The doc follows then up and coming community organizer Cory Booker in his 2002 attempt to become mayor of Newark, New Jersey. In his way lies the impressive political machine of 12 year incumbent Sharpe James. Once James realizes Booker is for real all bets are off, and he unleashes a series of dirty tricks that has to be seen to be believed. Luckily the good people at SnagFilms are sharing Street Fight online.
All these films provoke similar questions. If politics is theater, just where does the performance end? Do we ever catch a glimpse of what a candidate is like “for real”? And how will we know it when we see it? Perhaps Direct Cinema brings us closer, but is it ever close enough?
Chris Marker, the enigmatic filmmaker, writer, photographer, multimedia artist and philosopher, died this summer in Paris on his 91st birthday. A member of the French Resistance during World War Two, Marker’s filmmaking career began in the 1950s as part of Paris’s Left Bank Film movement and ended just before his death with strange video experiments on his youTube channel. The six decades in between generated a remarkable body of work that will continue to demand attention far into the future.
Throughout the history of True/False a quotation from Marker has served us as a guidepost: “Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined”. This wonderfully bewildering sentence invites multiple interpretations and has us still scratching our heads ten years on. But whatever else it may mean, it clearly points towards Marker’s greatest achievement, the discovery of a new type of nonfiction filmmaking. Marker’s films don’t compile facts, they seek out experiential truths, uncovered at the intersection of the world and an individual mind, complete with its passions, its memories and its political commitments. By bringing the essay into the cinema, Chris Marker changed the documentary form fundamentally and permanently.
Immediately following his death, Dennis Lim composed Marker’s obituary for The New York Times. Lim observed, “His sprawling and constantly evolving body of work, which ranged from books to installations to CD-ROMs and included more than 50 films of varying length, was at once fragmentary and cohesive, united by an abiding interest in the nature of time and memory and by a strong physical and intellectual wanderlust.” Ronald Bergan covered his passing in The Guardian, noting, “Marker’s creative use of sound, images and text in his poetic, political and philosophical documentaries made him one of the most inventive of film-makers. They looked forward to what is called ‘the new documentary’, but also looked back to the literary essay in the tradition of Michel de Montaigne.”
Perhaps the best overview of Marker’s filmography is this essay written by Catherine Lupton for The Criterion Collection, in which Lupton argues that “The subjective documentary viewpoint, which Marker did so much to pioneer, is now the norm rather than the outrageous exception”. In addition, the blog chrismarker.org hosts a wealth of writings both about and by Marker. This includes this essay by Marker on the repetition of the words “freedom and power” in his favorite film, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. It concludes with the characteristic provocation “Obviously, this text is addressed to those who know Vertigo by heart. But do those who don’t deserve anything at all?”
Of the 52 films Marker directed, two have been universally recognized as masterpieces. The first is La Jetée (1962), a 27 minute science fiction film created entirely, with one brief but important exception, out of still black and white photographs. It’s story, perhaps familiar through Terry Gilliam’s 1995 remake 12 Monkeys, is about a post apocalyptic time traveler, drawn into the past by a powerful childhood memory of a woman’s face.
One remarkable thing about the film, given the restrained nature the visuals, is how effectively the story is told through its rich soundtrack. Film critic Michael Koresky examined this soundscape in a video essay for the Criterion Collection titled “Echo Chamber: Listening to La Jetée“.
Marker’s second masterpiece is Sans Soleil (1985). In it a woman reads us the letters of a fictional camera man, clearly representing Marker, who travels the globe in an uninhibited search for “things that quicken the heart”. Perhaps the greatest of all essay films, Sans Soleil ties together musings on video games, shrines to cats, censored pornography, revolutionary politics, Vertigo, stray dogs and countless other things, creating a captivating philosophical reflection on the nature of time and memory.
Both La Jetée and Sans Soleil are available as part of single DVD box set from the Criterion Collection and available streaming on Hulu Plus.
The Louise Blouin Foundation of London is currently presenting a survey exhibition of Marker’s video and photographic work. The video introduction below displays some of the Marker’s photography of North Korea, and a series juxtaposing images of female passengers on a Paris subway with traditional artistic representations of beauty.
Finally, in honor of his passing, Criterion is sharing a short film by Marker, created during the filming of the Vertigo segment of Sans Soleil. Junkopia (1981) is a wordless observation of discarded objects, which Marker somehow imbues with a hypnotic power.
Hopefully these resources will encourage you to begin your exploration of Chris Marker’s substantial oeuvre. As his guiding obsession is with time and memory, it seems fitting to revisit his works again and again. They always seem to have new secrets to share with us.
DocuMemories, our retrospective series counting down the months until T/F 2013, continues on Monday, October 29th at Ragtag Cinema with October Country (T/F 2009).
October Country presents a single year, from Halloween to Halloween, in the life of the Mosher family of upstate New York. Trapped by cycles of war, absent fathers, teen pregnancy and child abuse, the Moshers struggle courageously against an incessant hopelessness sadly common among the working poor. Created by the team of family member Donal Mosher and filmmaker Michael Palmieri, the film is unforgettable in its startling intimacy and otherworldly beauty. The insider/outsider approach yields a carefully balanced perspective, empowering the subjects to speak forcefully and directly about their lives and avoiding the pitfall of exploitation that similar films frequently stumble into.
The projectbegan when its co-directors discovered each other’s work. Michael Palmieri is an accomplished director of music videos, like the one below from 2003 for Beck’s “Lost Cause”.
Donal Mosher made himself known through his compelling first-person photography, frequently of his family and some of the seemingly mundane objects in their lives.
photo by Donal Mosher
photo by Donal Mosher
photo by Donal Mosher
More of these photographs can be seen on Donal Mosher’s website. They are also featured on his blog GHOSTTYPE, a series of eloquent and evocative ruminations well worth exploring. Mosher’s artwork offers the best preview of the haunting atmosphere of October Country.
Years later, October Country‘s power still resonates. We look forward to experiencing this film again and hope you’ll join us.
Tickets to DocuMemories are:
$8.50 for the general public.
$5 for Ragtag members and all T/F volunteers; if you’ve ever volunteered for T/F 2003-2012, dig out your volunteer pass and present it at the box office to receive the member discounted admission price of $5 for all films in the series (you must present your pass, sorry but there are thousands of you out there and we need some way to recognize your contribution to receive the discount)
FREE for current Guffman members and T/F 2013 Super Circle Passholders.
FREE on a space available basis for Ragtag, Uprise, 9th Street Video and T/F 2012-2013 Core Staff employees.
Editorial note: this essay was originally published in July of 2011. We are sharing it again following Forbidden Lie$ screening in our retrospective series DocuMemories.
Even before I began working with the festival in any official capacity, I’d spent an undue amount of time pondering the meaning of the name David and Paul chose for it. True/False. Did they intend to ironically posit the existence of a dichotomy between the two concepts? Or is that little slash in-between indicative of their belief that something can be at once true and false: a representation of reality in search of some transcendent truth but nevertheless constructed, constrained by subjectivity, compromised? To what do documentary filmmakers possess the greatest responsibility: to the facts of the case (the truth) or to some abstract bigger picture (the Truth)? All of which is a long-winded way of saying that, at the outset of this new project, I’d like to take the opportunity to discuss what I consider the quintessential True/False film — if not its best (obviously, it has a lot of competition for that slot), at least the fullest embodiment of its thematic concerns.
Anna Broinowski’s Forbidden Lie$ is a film whose pleasures are best experienced knowing as little as possible about what’s in store, so consider this a warning to get out while you still can. Lie$ focuses on Norma Khouri, a 34-year-old Jordanian hair-stylist-cum-author with an accentless facility with English and devastatingly tragic story: Her childhood friend Dalia, with whom she ran a small unisex salon, was killed by her own father in order to preserve her honor after she initiated a relationship with a Christian man. Her friend’s terrible fate led Khouri to become a dedicated opponent of the Islamic practice of honor killings, and Lie$ initially celebrates her activism — even going to the trouble of re-enacting excerpts of Dalia’s romantic (but still entirely chaste) dalliances as depicted in Khouri’s subsequent memoir, Forbidden Love (or Honor Lost, in the States).
The film’s first half hour is an unremitting hagiography of Khouri, depicted herein as somebody approaching martyr status. It highlights her sacrifices for her noble cause; her daring stand against violent religious fundamentalism has not only resulted in threats against her life (she claims a fatwa on her head) but has also prevented her from focusing on herself (at 34 years, still a virgin!). This all culminates in a playacted montage of Dalia’s fatal tryst, accompanied by a truly terrible pop song celebrating the couple’s love. This scene, completely bewildering in its apparent tone-deaf romanticism, is the point at which I seriously contemplated abandoning the theatre during my first viewing. But then something utterly remarkable happens: The music video abruptly ends with a screech, the fake Dalia melts into sand, and the film cedes ground to Jordanian journalist and activist Rana Husseini, who systematically refutes and dismantles the claims of Forbidden Love one by one. And this is when we realize we’ve been set up, borne witness to a spectacular feat of misdirection.
As Khouri’s story begins to fall apart (and, despite Khouri’s best efforts, it begins to fly apart at the seams), it’s useful to self-reflexively examine your own reactions to this first part. In granting so much time to recreations of events that probably never happened and certainly didn’t happen as Khouri wrote they did, Broinowski implicitly acknowledges the primacy of illusion: To what extent is how we define things as “true” a product of what we visually perceive? To have Khouri narrate the story might leave a lingering doubt; to provide a visual approximation of her story erases it, so great is the privilege granted the image in the mind. I was so repulsed by the film’s lovey-dovey romanticization of Muslim-Christian miscegenation (replete with soft focus and dissolve editing) that it never even occurred to me that the entire affair might not have existed at all. In undermining her own dramatizations, Broinowski undermines the inviolable sanctimony of the image in general.
Similarly, Forbidden Lie$ invites troubling questions about the extent to which we accept narratives because they conform to our own political ideologies. Was Khouri’s story received so widely and with such scant skepticism in Western countries due to its depiction of Islamic society as ruled by oppressive moral absolutism and a violence-sanctioning patriarchy? The opening minutes of Lie$ sees Khouri making jokes about media censorship within Jordan — and it sees Western, predominantly white audiences eating her performance up. Khouri’s incessant claim that honor killings occur unnoticed within Jordanian society could be facially rejected with just the barest amount of research, and yet her stories undoubtedly resonate with Western audiences. It slowly becomes apparent that, by offering a fictionalized Jordanian society as a foil, Khouri reflects back at us the values we wish to project: freedom, justice, tolerance.
Near the beginning of F for Fake, Orson Welles pledges that “For the next hour, everything you hear from us is really true and based on solid fact” — and he begins lying through his teeth the moment the hour’s over. The point? The act of telling the truth is inextricable from the act of drawing lines, definitions of situations. And this is what makes Norma Khouri such a compelling figure as well; she has an uncanny ability to wriggle out of the most blatant prevarication, mostly because she knows precisely where the line is at all times. Rather than spewing outright lies, she allows people to make assumptions and clears the air only when her façade is in danger of utter collapse. Over the course of the film, untold damaging details come to light: She’s a U.S. citizen, she’s married with kids, she’s under investigation by the FBI — and, incredibly, nothing seems to stick.
The scary part? Khouri’s complicity throughout the whole thing. Even with Khouri almost definitively outed as a fraud, one gets the impression that she remains in sole charge of her story, that we’re still only seeing what she wants us to see. I mean, Norma’s seen blowing smoke against a black screen between the film’s chapters, and she’s far too shrewd a wit not to realize that potency of that visual metaphor. “There is no real Norma,” says a lie-detector expert at one point during the film. True to that sentiment, we cannot by film’s end say that we have a better grasp of just who Norma Khouri is than we did at the beginning; our search for truth ended the moment of its inception, and we’re left with these small, flawed pieces that, if we try to gather them, flow from our fingers like the sands of Jordan. In the end, Forbidden Lie$ represents an elegant synthesis of form and content: If Khouri is a con artist, we could very well say the same thing of her movie.
Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry (T/F 2012) is now playing at our sister theater Ragtag Cinema. This film introduces us to Ai Weiwei, a provocative artist and political activist, challenging the authoritarian Chinese state with wit, charisma, and intelligence as he pioneers a new style of activism for the age of Twitter.
Director Alison Klayman created a preview of Never Sorry for the New York Times Op-Docs. This short introduces Weiwei’s political evolution and his remarkable body of artwork, containing photography, sculpture, architecture, installations, and documentary.
During this year’s fest Klayman visited our filmmaker lounge and explained to Sundance Now how she became involved in telling Weiwei’s story, and why a holistic view is required to fully appreciate his diverse art and complex public persona.
Weiwei first provoked the ire of the Chinese state with his incendiary photography. His most famous image, Study of Perspective: Tiananmen, shows his own arm making an obscene gesture in the direction of the famous landmark.
The conflict between Weiwei and the state intensified during the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, when Weiwei objected to his architectural design, the Bird’s Nest stadium, being used for what he regarded as propaganda purposes in the games opening and closing ceremonies. “I very openly criticize the tendency to use culture for the purpose of propaganda, to dismiss the true function of art and the intellect.”
Another focal point of Weiwei’s activism was the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. When it became clear that shoddy government construction standards were in large part responsible for the earthquake’s horrible impact, Weiwei published the names of victims on his blog, which eventually grew into a list of 5,385 people. His harrowing footage of the destruction eventually became one of his many documentary films, So Sorry.
Fellow activist Tan Zuoren was charged with “inciting subversion of state power” for his reporting on the earthquake. Weiwei’s attempts to present evidence at his trial became the subject of another documentary, Disturbing the Peace. Here Weiwei engages in Michael Moore-esque ambushes, filming squirming government officials as he tries to weave his way through the bureaucratic labyrinth.
Throughout this time, Weiwei experienced persistent harassment by the police, but the situation grew much worse in 2011. In January his studio was demolished by the authorities, and in April he was arrested and held in detention for 81 days. After before being released into a strict house arrest for alleged tax evasion, he created a 24/7 webcast of his own home as an ironic statement on the state’s surveillance, but was quickly forced to shut it down. He only recently began sharing the humiliating details of his incarceration with the New York Times and giving interviews to Western media about his life under constant observation.
Despite all of this, Weiwei continues to make art. Unable to leave China, Weiwei contributed from afar to the design of the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in London with his longtime collaborators Herzog & de Meuron. Weiwei’s previous work with this architectural firm includes the Bird’s Nest Stadium and the unfinished Ordos 100 villas in Mongolia. His work on the villas was covered in another of Weiwei’s documentaries, recently released, also titled Ordos 100.
This all just scratches the surface of Weiwei’s art and personality. If you missed Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry at True/False or just want to see it again, swing by Ragtag Cinema some time soon. You won’t be sorry.
In the lead up to the 10th True/False Film Fest, we’ve been digging through the archive a bit, looking over the collection of films we’ve shown. These films graced our screens for only a matter of hours, but we still feel connected with them, and privileged that we got to share them with you. It got us wondering; what are your favorites?
We thought it’d be fun to make a collection top five lists. Share your five favorite T/F films with us and we’ll publish them here on truefalse.org. Just contact us at daniel.r.steffen@gmail.com and let us know:
Your name
A sentence about yourself (what you do for work, what you’re interested in, ect.)
Your five favorite T/F Films, either features or shorts, numbered 1. through 5. in the order of your preference
Your one favorite memory of the Fest
To help jog your memory, below is a complete list of films we’ve shown, both features and shorts, grouped by year. You can also browse the archive here and explore the unique web design for each year’s fest.
Just a reminder, our secret screenings are secret forever. Sadly, they are not eligible.
