Where do we start the story of our day? Where should we stop? How about we start with a momentous, seemingly impossible marvel?

Bad film-school movies start with a character waking up to an alarm clock going off. We’ll begin the day’s fest digest here: the moment we became conscious that we had a body, that we existed, and that the rules of physics were still firmly in place: a man in a hot-pink shirt went running past us missing us by inches. We stepped back, surprised, and a woman in a neon green shirt just about got us from the other side. Then it occurred to us: this was the True Life run, and we had ambled dumbly into the course of the race. We exist in a dream-like place this weekend. Walking out of movies, regaining our selves, losing it again. We must remember what is real. We must construct a narrative that makes some kind of sense. Our stories are what define us.

Jeff Feuerzeig, director of Author: The JT LeRoy Story and Heidi Ewing, director of Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You were talking about film in front of a crowd of people. This was Synapses, in the Reynolds Journalism Institute – a little like a panel, but not. Susan Sontag once said something like, “intelligence is something that happens between two people,” and we think she’s touched on the logic of the Synapse, which is new this year. Jeff and Heidi were there to talk about how they craft cinematic biography. There was a discharge of ions, action potential was reached, the nerve-ending fired, and Heidi said, “I wondered how to do a biography of Detroit,” as if the city were a character. We all just stared at her. But the city is not not a character, we think. How do you make a biography of a city? Then Heidi tells us. We paraphrase: “Call everyone you know in that city you wish to make a biography of. Ask each person you call, ‘What ten people would you say are the Detroit-est?’ Make a list of the names they give you, and then contact those names. Have those people give you their list of the five most Detroit-est. Those are your characters.”

The characters of True/False are on the screen but also milling around. We thought we’d find a hardcore extremist segment of the True/False characters by showing up to the intermission of the 344-minute film Homeland, about an Iraqi family before and after the second Gulf-War invasion. Who are these people, we wondered, who would see a 344-minute film? We saw a bus-tub get carried out of Big Ragtag, where Homeland was showing, and it was overflowing with Girl-Scout cookie boxes and empty soda bottles. That’s how they’re doing it, we realize. Quick calories. Focus. Here they come from inside, now, at the halfway point, taking a break from Homeland: Dan and Stacie look beleaguered, eyes bloodshot, moving slowly, looking happy. Why did you choose this film, we asked, and they said, “We chose it because we’ve never seen anything like it.” Seth, also watching Homeland, said, “I have temporarily regained some sense of how soft our existence is,” to which we can only nod.

We have a cup of soup at Uprise bakery and watch two out-of-towners, press passes around their necks, guy and girl, working on laptops across from each other. Guy on the left spills his soda all over the table, and it runs beneath her laptop. True/False volunteer number 982, Johnny Pez, materializes with a rag in less than five seconds. The guy and the girl hit it off and start talking. A connection is forged. Out come the business cards. We wonder if they will be life-long friends.

“There wasn’t a dry-eye in the place,” says a moviegoer named Cindy, of the moment when Sonita emerged from behind the black curtain following her film and rapped for Jesse hall.

During the film Starless Dreams, pathos is like a bubble of warm air that inflates inside of us, filling, breaking, refilling, and then just barely deflating again. Director Mehrdad Oskouei, recipient of this year’s True Vision award, said, when introducing his film, “I am very very happy now,” and we were, too. Pathos. This was in the palatial Missouri Theater. “I dedicate this prize to these girls you see, to whom nobody dedicates anything,” Mehrdad said, and left the stage without his trophy. A volunteer collected it on his behalf before the film began. The extreme pathos we feel when the girl who’s named herself Nobody, living in a jail for juvenile delinquents in Iran, tells us about her family life, is instantly transformed by a babbling, giggling baby, which the young women wash together, and later make dance.

Up Ninth Street, T/F icon Johnny St. John celebrated his tenth year as the angry, recidivist host of Gimme Truth, America’s favorite documentary game show. As always, Gimme Truth featured 10 short-films from local directors. In one, a man is struck by lightning four times. We are very proud of our tiny festival-within-a-festival. Another Murray Center student Morgan Lieberman celebrated her first place finish for her pitch-perfect bank-robbery short Steve’s Legos. Kirsten Johnson (Poitras’ collaborator) tied with fellow judge Roger Ross Williams for most shrewd discernment sussing out truthiness from falsity. Morgan Neville rounded up the rear. 

Added in the last few days to the T/F schedule was the “Concerned Student 1950” screening. It happened at the Missouri Theatre at around 11:45pm, and it was easy to see why the 30-minute, behind-the-scenes and wrenched-from-the-frontlines film was undeniable to T/F programmers. Piggybacking this surprise film onto the end of a packed show of Secret Screening Navy involved ushering in 300 attendees into emptied seats post Q&A, it became a historic occasion in itself, the most memorable moment in 13 years of True/False.  Our city (which temporarily included luminaries such as Spike Lee and Laura Poitras) got to watch itself on screen, showing a convulsive time when the University of Missouri was turned upside down last fall. Was it kismet, serendipity, or pure luck that the biggest, most explosive thing that ever happened to Columbia coincided with the birth of the Murray Center for Documentary Journalism AND New York-based Field of Vision? Three bright-eyed students – backed by ace talents – met head-on with the unfolding drama of other students demanding change, and demanding it now, and improbably getting quite a few answered including the resignation of a university president. Concerned Studens 1950’s final chants of “Ashé power!” — Yoruba for power – obliterated everything that came before in the fest.

True/False 2016 Daily Digest: Saturday, March 5, 2016