Alas, another True/False is behind us, and we must all part ways. The gratitude we are feeling towards our town, our volunteers, our guests and everyone else who came out to support the fest can not be put into words. Thank you, together we built something special.

If you’re looking to bask in the afterglow of T/F 2013, we can point you in a few directions. Our friends at the Columbia Daily Tribune really outdid themselves with their coverage this year. The crowd-sourced POYi  photo project offers a random tour of the weekend that was. And KBIA created an audio postcard from the fest. We’ll have much more coverage on our blog as it begins to roll in over the next few days.

We’d like to thank the good people at Encyclopedia Pictura for creating the video series that played before our screenings this year. This was the first time our bumpers were themselves documentaries, recording the creation of strange and wonderful structures. You can revisit these fanciful places below.

Sunday was another day crammed full of films and events. To name just a few, at The Blue Note the La Operación Jarocha of Veracruz played a fiery set before a showing of Who is Dayani Cristal?, the film they created the soundtrack for. Later, co-director David Wilson presented Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel with our True Vision Award before a screening of their powerfully immersive Leviathan. David noted their work is “changing the way other filmmakers think about film”.

Following a packed screening of Cutie and the Boxer at the historic Missouri Theater, 81-year old action-painter Ushio Shinohara jabbed at a canvas in the parking lot of Tiger Cleaners.

Our big closing night films at Jesse and the Missouri Theater were Twenty Feet From Stardom and No. Afterwards everyone huddled together in the Missouri Theater’s lobby for the bittersweet Busker’s Last Stand. They assembled musicians brought True/False 2013 to a fitting conclusion.

One last look at some of the reactions on our #truefalse hashtag.

Driving home, trying to pick a favorite film of the fest. Have to say The Gatekeepers. Loved the transparency of the sujects. #truefalse
-Alex @amc112

Can’t stop thinking about “The Crash Reel”– an incredible, inspiring documentary @lucyjwalker @KevinPearce #truefalse
-Candice Aviles @CandiceAviles

I am so proud of the so many people from The Crossing I see volunteering this weekend at true/false. #truefalse
-Dave Cover @davecover

#TheInstitute was the perfect cap for #truefalse this year. Best Q&A of the festival.
-Mike Sickels @SocioMike

COMPUTER CHESS is a weird ass TERMINATOR prequel #truefalse
-Robert Greene @prewarcinema

Went to #truefalse thinking I’d just see some films. Ended up with an emotional, life-changing weekend that added perspective to my life.
-Em. @EmilyRackers

Again, our deepest thanks to everyone who made this festival happen. Here’s to the next ten years!

Saturday is the biggest and craziest day of True/False. Today featured 42 screenings on 8 screens in addition to concerts, panels, a fete, a stroll, a race and a game show!

Things started off at 9:00 AM with an extra chilly edition of our True Life Run. Seventy or so brave souls faced down the cold and competed, with Mike Burden finishing victorious.

The True Life Run is a benefit for our True Life Fund. Which Way is the Front Line from Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington, this year’s True Life Fund film, played to a near capacity crowd at the 1,700 seat Jesse Hall in an especially moving screening. Before the film pastor Dave Cover of sponsor The Crossing explained his church’s interest in “film as a window into the human condition”. Afterwards Sebastian Junger received a standing ovation for his film about his fallen comrade.

As David mentioned at the show, this is the first time the subject of the True Life Film is no longer with us. The Fund will be benefiting two causes, The Milton Margais School for the Blind, an institution that played an important role in Tim’s life and work, and Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues, a charity created by Junger to offer freelance war reporters free medical training. Junger explained why started RISC, “I realized that if I had been with him, I couldn’t have saved his life, cause I didn’t know what to do either”.  You can donate to the True Life Fund online.

Saturday’s events included our annual soiree at PS Gallery, the Filmmaker Fete.

And Speed Levitch’s whimsical tour of the town, The Speculative Stroll.

photo by Andrew Richmond

The 2013 edition of Gimme Truth!, the world’s only (known) documentary game show, was the first to feature a panel of all returning judges, reigning champion Heidi Ewing (Detropia, Jesus Camp), Bill Ross (Tchoupitoulas, 45365) and Sergio Oksman (Notes on the Other, A Story for the Modlins). Between tequila shots, the trio watched ten 2-minute shorts and tried determine if they were 100% True or 100% False. Hosted by Johnny St. John, Gimme Truth! is big part of what makes True/False True/False.

photo by Catherine Meagher

T/F’s Chelsea Myers interviewed Lucy Walker, the director of one of Saturday’s big hits, The Crash Reel, for this short video. In it Walker discusses the multi-source documentary.

As always, our secret weapon, the T/F busking army, was out in full force. The day concluded the So Many Dynamos headlining our Mojo’s A-Go-Go showcase. Earlier, Snya So Pro warmed up a crowd at The Blue Note.

Our #truefalse hashtag continues to collect outbursts of enthusiasm. Here are a few examples:

Crash Reel had me tearing up so many times. Such a great film. Congrats to Lucy Walker and team! #truefalse
-Dan Lindsay  @dan_lindsay

Wow! The Last Station. Intimate look at the last days of life with fantastic cinematography. And the sounds too, so wonderful. #truefalse
-Brandon Hoops @courtsidehoops

I’ve got that cold clammy hand feeling of just having seen one of the best docs in years; THE ACT OF KILLING. #truefalse
-Tom Roston @DocSoupMan

“Cutie and the Boxer” is a revelation. A near-perfect film. #truefalse
-Aarik Danielsen @aarikdanielsen

“Which Way Is the Front Line from Here?”: The life of a journalist who successfully humanized war and people involved. #truefalse
-Katie Yaeger @KatieYaeger

When Jeremy Scahill spoke after Dirty Wars, I just wanted to get up and shout “AMEN” to everything he said. #truefalse
-Beatriz Costa-Lima ?@Bcostalima

Cutie and the Boxer was a unique love story, romantic but also painfully messy. And to meet the protagonists! What a day. #truefalse
-Luke Damiani @lukeandrewd

Can you believe it? Only one day left. We’ll see you tomorrow!

photo by Scott Patrick Myers

True/False spread out even wider in day two of the fest. Films played on all eight of our screens and were joined by concerts, parties, panels and a parade. Friday’s March March is always among the highlights, a raucous reminder that Spring is around the corner and True/False has launched into high gear. In this year’s edition the punk/circus marching band Mucca Pazza led the procession of costumed revelers to the Missouri Theater.

Later at the Missouri Theater, Manhunt, Greg Barker’s gripping detective story about the search for Osama Bin Laden, played to a packed house.

Paul Rucker wowed the crowd with his experimental cello playing before a screening of Sleepless Nights at Little Ragtag.

At Campfire Stories filmmakers basked in an intimate glow and shared tales of what could have been. One standout entry was from Emma Davie of I am Breathing, who explained her unusual collaboration with the film’s subject. Across the street from Shakespeare’s The Great Wall outdoor film installation featured a far-ranging shorts program. And T/F Friday always comes to a close with @CTION, the year’s hottest party at Tonic nightclub, with MNDR spinning for the crowd.

photo by Catherine Meagher

We have a few interesting clips to share from our post film Q and As. Andy Wolff of The Captain and His Pirate explains the how and the why of his conversations with a Somali pirate.

And Emma Davie of I Am Breathing explains the difficulty of documenting intense human suffering.

If you’re looking to hear more from our filmmakers or scout films to Q for during the rest of the weekend, KBIA has an excellent eight part series called True/False Conversations. In it they chat with the filmmakers and subjects of The Moo Man, Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer, Cutie and the Boxer, Computer Chess, Expedition to the End of the World, I Am Breathing, After Tiller and Twenty Feet From Stardom. You can listen to the audio or read the text of a transcript.

Finally, our #truefalse hashtag continues to collect reactions from around the fest. Here are a few.

The Crash Reel was absolutely exhilarating and heart-breaking all at once. #truefalse
-Taylor Glascock @tayloremrey

THE MOO MAN: sweet, and laugh out loud funny. Shared a mimosa with the farmer at #sundance – he’s just as charming in real life. #truefalse
-Andrew Droz Palermo @DrozPalermo

Lindsay Martin’s MY FAVORITE PICTURE OF YOU – slayed me – perfectly paired with STORIES WE TELL #truefalse
-jonkelland @DocCritic

@StoriesDoc played to 1700 at Jesse tonight. Amazing. Lovely film. All the best to you and your family right now @SarahEPolley. #truefalse
-Beth Kopine Canipe @BKCanipe

the power of #truefalse, i get soft-hearted and teary-eyed as @davidkinofist earnestly thanks sponsors for their support before shows
-jonkelland @DocCritic

It’s not #truefalse without Toughcats!
-Aarik Danielsen @aarikdanielsen

Just finished Dirty Wars. Prophetic line from early in the film: “If children are terrorists, we are terrorists.” #truefalse
-guavalicious @guavalicious

Good night and see you tomorrow!

The tenth True/False began in style at our opening night gala, The Jubilee, at the historic Missouri Theater. A crowd gathered in masquerade for libations and revelry before a screening of Sarah Polley’s new film Stories We Tell.

photo by Sarah Hoffman

Before the film newly christened Oscar winner Malik Bendjelloul, director of Searching for Sugar Man (T/F 2012), took to the stage and introduced My Favorite Picture of You, a new short by 2012′s Oscar winner, Dan Lindsay.

photo by Scott Patrick Myers

True/False 2013 also launched on four other screens and at two concerts. The Blue Note opened with the shocking expose Dirty Wars, while at little Ragtag the Neither/Nor series with critic Eric Hynes continued with the underappreciated classic The Fall. The Blue Fugue’s “True/Folk” showcase was followed by an all experimental lineup at Cafe Berlin. Meantime in Alley A visiting artist Yulia Pinkusevich finished assembling her “Stilted” installation.

photo by Scott Patrick Myers

The conversation on our #truefalse hashtag still hasn’t slowed down. A few examples:

Finally saw THE FALL. A radical hymn to the potential of nonfiction. A film from the past that was the future. #truefalse cc: @eshynes
-Robert Greene @prewarcinema

Welcome to the T/F 2013 Fest digest, a running report of everything (well, at least some things) going on around town during these four crazy days. For more coverage of T/F 2013 we highly recommend the Columbia Daily Tribune’s excellent True/False hub.

As Paul and David point out in this year’s welcome, True/False wouldn’t and couldn’t exist without our army of volunteers. We received a convincing reminder earlier this week when a winter storm dumped several inches of snow on Columbia. Our volunteers answered the call and armed with shovels cleared sidewalks and alleyways.

photo by Sarah Hoffman

Thanks to their valiant efforts, we are now officially underway. Our box office at the corner of Hitt and Broadway is buzzing with excitement.

And our first official screening, Village At the End of the World, has begun at the Forrest Theater!

photo by Catherine Meagher

We’ll have more to report real soon. In the meantime, check out our Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for more images and updates.

Here are pics of the accessories and apparel available right now in our box office at the corner of Broadway and Hitt. You’ll also find posters and our new book Rarely Has Reality Needed So Much to Be Re-imagined: A Mostly True History of the True/False Film Fest. True/False merchandise is available year round at our online store.

Every year True/False attracts an amazing collection of the sharpest minds in nonfiction film. Q and As are great, but to get the most out of this assembly of intellects you’ll need to check out our panels. This series of eight conversations runs Friday through Sunday at The Odd Fellows Lodge at the southwest corner of Tenth and Walnut. All of these discussions are free and open to the public. Don’t miss your chance to hear in depth from filmmakers and other guests as they bounce ideas off of one another and probe deeper into the science and art of documentary filmmaking.

Picture from the "Off the Screen and Into the Streets" Panel at T/F 2011

Things get underway on Friday at 10:30 AM with “The Revolution Will Be Criticized: Do Critics Miss the Boat on Nonfiction Filmmaking?” Robert Greene, director of Kati with an I and Fake It So Real, moderates this discussion on the state of documentary criticism with critics Eric Hynes, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Miriam Bale and Vadim Rizov. This panel is inspired in part by Greene’s recent Hammer to Nail piece on cinematic nonfiction, in which he wrote of film critics:

What are they missing? Well, almost no one is talking seriously about the collapsing walls between fiction, nonfiction and art cinema. Nonfiction cinema would best be described as a way of seeing and less a rigid and prescriptive “genre.” The most interesting documentaries push narrative bounds, re-shoot situations (as opposed to the somewhat tired practice of reenactment), play with the idea of performance, etc. They break the rules. Most interesting fiction, to me, is rooted in the observational camera, staging the action with the soul of cinema verité. How do so-called fiction and nonfiction films speak to each other? How do the stories being told or the situations being captured change according to approach? No one is asking these questions.

This idea of fiction and nonfiction films speaking to one another will be taken up again at 12:30 with the “Revolving Doors” panel. Sarah Gavron, director of the documentary Village at the End of the World and Josh Marston, director of the fictional films The Forgiveness of Blood and Maria Full of Grace will attempt to elucidate what their disciplines can teach each other.

Friday’s panels conclude at 2:30 with “Military Secrets: Filming in the Armed Forces” moderated by Steve James of Hoop Dreams, The Interrupters and most relevantly The War Tapes. Participates Rick Rowley and Sebastian Junger both have war related films in this year’s festival (Dirty Wars and Which Way is the Front Line From Here respectively) while the third panelist Kirby Dick recently captured an Independent Spirit Award for best documentary for his film Invisible War. Despite their shared interest in military matters, these are all very different films and the contrasts should make for an interesting exchange.

Saturday things get started again at 10:30 with “Docs in the Land of the Short Attention Span”. Panelists Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar are documentary veterans with impressive filmographies. Their latest collaboration is Reinvention Stories, a just launched web-based interactive film about Dayton, Ohio. In this panel they’ll share what they learned from this project and ponder the promise and peril the internet represents for documentary film.

Next, at 1:00 it’s “Strongmen and Dissidents: Filming in the Former Soviet Union” moderated by Dana O’Keefe of Vladimir Putin in Deep Concentration. This discussion will explore the difficulties of documentary filmmaking in the face of creeping authoritarianism. The panelists are Tinatin Gurchiani of The Machine Which Makes Everything Disappear, Maxim Pozdorovkin of Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer, Askold Kurov of Winter, Go Away! and the director of Secret Screening Red.

Saturday wraps up at 3:00 with “DIY or DIE! Do-It-Yourself as a Way of Life”, a panel especially relevant to this year’s theme, “The Collective Architecture of the Impossible”. Panelists will discuss the importance of the DIY ethos both inside and outside of the film world. They are Emma Dessau of the Folk to Folk music project, Emily Hemeyer of the St.Louis based art collective Spore, Thomas Sallings of Columbia’s newest music venue, the Hair Hole and the director of Secret Screening Green. Moderated by Julie Shapiro of the Third Coast Film Festival.

Our final two panels take place on Sunday. First at 1 it’s “The Future of What? Staring at the Horizon of Nonfiction Filmmaking.” Ben Fowlie of the Camden International Film Festival will interrogate three filmmakers, each with a singular approach to the creative treatment of actuality. They are Signe Byrge Sørensen of The Act of Killing, Josh Fox of Gasland and Zachary Heinzlinger of Cutie and the Boxer.

Finally, things come to an end at 3:30 with “Every Cut is a Lie: Editing the Truth”. Moderated by David France, director of last year’s Oscar-nominated T/F hit How to Survive a Plague and recent New York Times interviewee, this panel explores the editor’s manipulative art of reassembling reality. Panelists are Robin Schwartz of America’s Parking Lot, Bill Ross of Tchoupitoulas and the editor of Secret Screening Orange.

We are excited to premiere James Miska’s new music video for “The Coldest Summer”, directed Chelsea Myers of True/False and Tiny Attic Productions. James has played T/F several times as a member of Bramble and has now relocated to Columbia. You can see James Miska & Lake Mary perform tomorrow night at 7 at The Blue Fugue as part of the True/Folk Happy Hour Showcase.

Pictures of the Year International and the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute are creating a crowd-sourced photo gallery of True/False 2013. This collection of images will be posted on the web and shown on monitors around town. If you want to contribute you can tweet photos to @POYi_TFproject or #poytf. They’ll also be pulling photos from @truefalse and #truefalse. You can email them pics directly at poyitf.project@gmail.com.

This year we are celebrating ten years of True/False with “The Collective Architecture of the Impossible”. Artist Erik Buckham’s fanciful favela is the perfect visual representation of our shared achievement, the result of the hard work and joyful energy thousands of volunteers, musicians, staff members, artists, filmmakers, sponsors and attendees have contributed to the festival over the course of a decade.

This idea of Collective Architecture speaks forcefully to the work of our design team. Every year the combined efforts of visiting artists, production staff and assisting volunteers transform downtown Columbia for four magical days, creating a utopia where new discoveries lie around every corner. The Art and Design page has a complete a venue by venue, installation by installation run down of everything happening around town. You also shouldn’t miss Rebecca Allen’s stunning photo essay of our production team hard at work.

Downtown’s main artery is Alley A, running from the Tiger Hotel over to Ragtag Cinema, and cutting right behind our box office. “Stilted”, California-based artist Yulia Pinkusevich’s ambitious take on The Collective Architecture of the Impossible, will cover the length of this passageway. You should visit Yulia’s homepage for numerous pictures and videos of her extensive body of work. Here’s a picture of small piece of “Stilted”.

The Mud Stencils, Jesse Graves and Morgan Herum, will be returning for their third True/False, decorating Columbia’s sidewalks and walls with their environmentally friendly street art. Last year they created this excellent bee mural next to Willie’s.

Moveable Type is setting up shop in the parking lot of the Picturehouse, our theater at the Missouri United Methodist Church. Kyle Durrie and her letterpressing 1982 Chevy van will be making custom prints using methods that have been around since the 1500s. Here’s a poster they made last year.

Right around the corner on the Picturehouse lawn members of St. Louis’s SPORE Collective are building “Migratory Hive Project” entirely out of reclaimed materials. This project will be massive when finished, but be sure to note the details.

For the Oddfellows Lounge Chicago based artist Theresa Vishnevetskaya created a piece called “Organ No. 2″, a hypnotic aggregation of ambient light, animatronics and interactive sound. See for yourself in this brief demonstration.

At the Southeast corner of Ninth and Cherry Gabe Meyer and Brian Doss are presenting “From Here To Home”, their dumpster-turned-work-of-art. This piece challenges traditional notions of what makes a house a home while tempting passers-by to curl up and take a nap beneath the warm glow of discarded plastic bags.

Artist Greg Orloff, the man responsible for both Ragtag’s digital conversion robot Lumen (hanging out at The Missouri Theater) and T/F 2010′s Time Machine, is turning a mishmash of gadgets and light into a film reel in the lobby of Jesse Hall. Meanwhile designers Gabrielle Parish, Audrey Keiffer, Madeline Carl and Dan Bugnitz are transforming our box office into an interactive playground of the miniature and the gargantuan.

photo by Stephen Bybee

At The Blue Note Glenn Rice’s returning sea creatures will be joined by coral incrusted TVs featuring video from the Chicago Film Archives. And Camellia Cosgray’s beautiful lighted megamap continues to adorn the wall of The Globe.

All of this just scratched the surface, as each and every venue at T/F has its own character and design. Be sure to refer back to the Art and Design page of your program all weekend to help navigate the art of True/False.