Since its beginning, T/F has served as a font of ideas, with most of them bubbling up on screen. But now non-filmmakers inject new ideas into the festival’s bloodstream and attempt to rearrange our worldviews. Rather than sequester these big thinkers to the fringes, we place them front and center, and sometimes invite them to jump on a soapbox for pre-film rants.
Field Sessions
The festival panel is a tired tradition, and T/F is doing its part to jettison it once and for all with our intimate Field Sessions. These close encounters between artists provide an unsurpassed intimacy that can’t be achieved in a multi person panel. Each session is a deep dive into the ideas that shape nonfiction filmmaking in 2020 and will be live-recorded for the “True/False Podcast.” All Field Sessions are held in the Little Chapel @ The Picturehouse and are free and open to the public.
Oscillation
Ursula Liang & Khalik Allah
Ursula Liang (Down a Dark Stairwell) and Khalik Allah (IWOW: I Walk on Water) freely alternate between journalism, photography, and cinema as they approach their subjects. The two artists will discuss their investment in exploring intersubjectivities and reshaping documentary grammar.Â
Friday, Mar 6, 1:30pm-2:30pm
Immersion
Marnie Ellen Hertzler & Mitch McCabe
Marnie Ellen Hertzler (Crestone) and Mitch McCabe (Civil War Surveillance Poems Part 1) both draw from apocalyptic themes as they interrogate rustic communities. From thorny ethical questions to their creative processes, the directors will excavate personal meaning from their complex films.
Friday, Mar 6, 3pm-4pm
Interrogation
Ra’anan Alexandrowicz & Basir Mahmood
Ra’anan Alexandrowicz (The Viewing Booth) and Basir Mahmood (Good Ended Happily) have created provocative films with embedded social and historical commentary. Together, they will examine their curiosities and the nuances of perspective.
Saturday, Mar 7, 1pm-2pm
Dimensions
Steve James & Meredith Zielke
Directors Steve James (City So Real) and Meredith Zielke (A Machine to Live In) situate their films in eclectic cities real and imagined. Join them as they consider things they have in common, challenges and rewards in navigating complex cityscapes, and their holistic approaches.
Saturday, Mar 7, 3pm-4pm
Events
HYPERALLERGIC
Willy Wilson @ Ragtag Saturday, Mar 7 / 11:45am
Join online arts magazine, Hyperallergic, editors Dessane Lopez Cassell (reviews) and Dan Schindel (documentary) for a panel discussion with leading critics, makers, and programmers on the challenges and quirks of writing about documentary in the current era. How do we navigate considerations of form, storytelling, audience expectations, and ever-evolving methods of distribution and access? These and many other questions will serve as a jumping-off point for some lively discourse.
Panelists will include Monica Castillo (New York Times, Remezcla, and Hyperallergic, among others), Jon-Sesrie Goff (The Flaherty/multidisciplinary artist), and Beatrice Loayza (MUBI, Remezcla, and Hyperallergic, among others).
THE RAMBLE
Box Office // Saturday, Mar 7 / 12pm-12:30pm
Box Office // Saturday, Mar 7 / 3:30pm-4pm
Box Office // Sunday, Mar 8 / 12pm-12:30pm
Box Office // Sunday, Mar 8 / 3:30pm-4pm
Is it T/F’s best-kept secret or its worst-publicized temporary installation? (Our sources say both…or perhaps neither.) Those with the foresight to set aside time for The Ramble, a collective poetic improvisation masquerading as a conventional downtown walking tour, will surely be rewarded. Under the guidance of longtime chaperone Gabriel Williams, this unclassifiable experience seeks to explore new ways of seeing, rewiring our appreciation for the built environment, and uniting the future with the past, while scrambling traditional ideas about performance, intention, and divination. Free and open to the public.
TAVIA STANZA ARTIST TALK
Bingham Gallery // Saturday, Mar 7 / 2pm
Fiber artist Tavia Sanza discusses Growth, installed in the rotunda at Jesse Hall, among other pieces. This artist talk provides an opportunity to learn more about her work, process and the progression of her installation as it continues to evolve.
BACK and SONG
Dirs. Elissa Blount-Moorhead, Bradford Young; 2019; 21min
28 N 9th Street //Â Mar 5 – 8 / Thursday 5:30pm-8pm / Friday 11am-8pm / Saturday 11am-8pm / Sunday 11am-8pm
A meditative four-channel film and art installation that reflects on health and wellness as part and parcel of the American black experience from cradle to grave. Back and Song considers the labor and care provided by generations of black healers—doctors, nurses, midwives, morticians, therapists, and health aides—and their histories of contribution to, and resistance of, the flawed and discriminatory structures of Western medicine.
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CTRL+ALT+SHIFT
Located at Columbia Art League // Thursday, 5:30pm-8pm / Friday 11am-8pm / Saturday 11am-8pm / Sunday 11am-8pm
BOTTLED SONGS 1 + 2
Chloé Galibert-laîné & Kevin B. Lee; 2019; video installation; 19 min
Two researchers investigate the dissemination of propaganda created by the terrorist organization known as the Islamic State and contemplate the media’s role in spreading this message. Exchanging video letters recorded from their computer desktops, the researchers share their thoughts and fears as they each dissect pieces of media produced by ISIS in 2014 that are still available online today.
DENOISE
Giorgio Ferrero & Federico Biasin; 2017; VR; 13 min
Silence and noise dictate the rhythms of workers’ daily routines, whose solitary jobs thrust the industrial world forward. An oil field in Texas, the engine room of an ocean-going freighter, and an immense anechoic chamber in Switzerland are backdrops for their process of creation, transport, validation, and destruction.
THE LEAP: Inside Architect Dorte Mandrup's Mind
 Ane Skak, Niels Bjørn; 2019; VR; 21 min
A stunning illustration of Danish architect Dorte Mandrup’s creative process, The Leap explores the intersection of living images, animation, and 3D modelling. This project documents Mandrup’s creation of the iconic Wadden Sea Centre by the west coast of Jutland, Denmark, and the majestic Ice Fjord Centre in Ilulissat, Greenland.
LIVING DISTANCE
Xin Liu; 2020; immersive; 10 min
It’s an old Chinese tradition that when a child loses a top tooth, they bury it in the ground. A displaced bottom tooth is tossed up to the ceiling. Inspired by this practice, artist and mechanical engineer Xin Liu launched her bottom wisdom tooth into space. Hitch a ride through the stratosphere on the celestial journey of this tiny, lifeless rock of flesh.
LUX SINE
Alex Suber; 2019; immersive; 12 min
Deep in the Black Hills of South Dakota lies the Wind Cave, also host to a subterranean Sanford Research Lab. This interactive piece unravels the cosmos through parallel explorations of darkness, at a former goldmine turned cutting-edge laboratory 4,850 feet below ground, and in a labyrinth of ancient passageways at the heart of the Lakota Sioux creation story.
TX-REVERSE 360°
Martin Reinhart & Virgil Widrich; 2019; VR; 5 min
This unsettling voyage of cinema-in-cinema flips time and space, exchanging the time (t) and space axis (x) in a film. Instead of the film frame representing a brief moment of time in space, the tx-transformation shows a tiny part of the space in time.