In keeping with this year’s theme, a quote from Those Who Jump: “The moment I touch the fence, I feel free.”
The first film of the fest kicked off at The Vimeo Theater at The Blue Note following an introduction by fest co-conspirator Paul Sturtz. He tantalized us by saying, “It is miraculous. We may have a very special guest later on Skype.” It turns out it’s director and star Abou Bakar Sidibé , in not-altogether-perfect True/False fashion: we get this guy video-feeding through the internet from a refugee camp, but we can’t hear his voice. We can only see him. We cheer when we see him. He looks almost as disappointed as us that we don’t have verbal contact. The sound isn’t coming through. Technicians Mike and Jon and Dylan scramble. Do we cancel the Q&A? We are about to cancel it when at the final moment his voice intercedes. “You say you exist when you film,” begins moderator Eric Hynes, and our interpreter translates. Abou nods, listening to the translation, has a drink of his refugee-camp coffee, and replies.
We aren’t following the lines here. See the day-one fest bumper: erase the lines. Encircle them. We will travel in reverse, to earlier today when we experienced Lost Letters, True/False’s newest, most mysterious experience. We aren’t allowed to talk about it, but we can indicate, using semaphore. Semaphore is part of Lost Letters. So are lab coats. So is a waiver. So is a guy telling you, in the waiting room, “Please do not chew on any live wires,” which at the time gave us some misgivings about embarking upon the experience, but fear not: Lost Letters is an immersive, cooperative experience that brings to mind and then surpasses the most wonderful games of youth.
There are so many venues at our festival! Everywhere you look is a venue. If it’s not showing movies then it’s a venue for anthropology. Everywhere are people decompressing, people venting, people recently brought to tears of joy now expounding on their upcoming plans for life-change. We will not claim credit for this. We defer to our guests. There are so many venues, we even ventured into what we thought was a venue, and was actually not: My Sister’s Circus on Broadway. This is ostensibly not a venue but may be a venue. We will leave it up to you.
We went into the volunteer headquarters on 9th street, aka The Nest. The place is beautiful and open, with a buffet of donuts and coffee for the volunteers, and plastic fold-out tables covered in paper where volunteers can graffiti their names. Our volunteer space is technology-enabled and slick. Our volunteers are happy. We have what we feel like is 3,977,987 volunteers but in fact we have 1004. When we went to The Nest, we found a space empty of people. More donuts were on the buffet table than people were in The Nest. One volunteer was asleep on the couch with a program over his head. Another volunteer was pouring herself coffee. Where are all the volunteers? we asked. Then it occurred to us.
We followed a guy holding an orange extension cord coiled up in his right hand through Alley A. The sunset was gorgeous looking west over Lucky’s. We were lucky to follow him. His radio chirped, “Someone’s run over our cones. It is already crazy,” and we recognized the voice over the radio as that of Glenn Rice, a long-time T/F magician, who we later caught up with at the Jubilee.
Everyone was having fun at the Jubilee. It was packed. Glenn Rice was trapped with us next to a plate of monkey bread. We asked Glenn, “Tell us something else crazy that happened besides the cones getting run over,” and he said, “Oh nothing. I almost got crushed by a lift falling off the back of a truck.”
We were worried about those lifts. Scissor lifts, jug lifts, crane lifts, all down Alley A. U-Hauls everywhere. Art coming out of all of them. At this point, nothing will surprise us. Our technicians stride deliberately to the edge of possibility, into the land of danger, and they thrive there. They are our big-wave surfers and this fest is their big wave. They are the cowboys and the tank-girls of this festival.
Alley A is so beautiful in the sunset right now, more beautiful than ever, thanks to the artists who have come here this year to beautify our city. The array of multicolored tubes hanging between buildings, the Chain and Plate, established in 1970 but only today finally recognized as true art thanks to a placard installed by volunteers. We always knew that Chain and Plate was art. Go see it right outside the back door of Broadway Brewery.
Back on Mount Gurugu, a man was waking up inside a cactus patch, on the screen inside of The Vimeo Theater at The Blue Note. Those Who Jump’s photography is beautiful. It was dawn over Morocco. He would, that day, make a break for the fence. Simultaneously, a man on the screen in the Forrest Theater’s shorts program “Stand Beside Her and Guide Her” described removing a human brain from the cranium in vivid detail. He went on to say, “I held the human brain in my hands and it hit me: this is a thing that writes poetry.”
We aren’t sure, but the woman who appears at the end of the two-minute thirty-second 8mm film Walden Brooklyn which plays at request in Davey B. Gravey’s Tiny Cinema, holding a stick, might be a lost love of his. We are overwhelmed with emotion. Inside the Jubilee, we ask a guy who saw Those Who Jump how he liked it and he said it was, “Moving, but frightening,” and we do not think we can add anything to that.
“I feel that I exist when I film,” says Abou, piped through the internet. We feel like we exist when we see documentary. This is what makes our job the best job on earth.
True/False 2016 Daily Digest: Thursday, March 3, 2016