Good news! The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has awarded True/False $10,000 for the continuation of its Neither/Nor Series. Now entering its sixth year, Neither/Nor is True/False’s ongoing survey of groundbreaking film movements that—through their imaginative approaches to sound, image, and reality—altered the course of nonfiction cinema. In keeping with its name, Neither/Nor draws attention to film movements that have traditionally been neglected by the documentary world (for not being ‘documentary enough’) and the fiction world (for being ‘too-documentary’).

For each edition of Neither/Nor, True/False selects a film programmer-writer, who researches that year’s focus and selects a handful of works to present throughout the True/False weekend (February 28 – March 3, 2019). During True/False, guests will participate in at least six free festival screenings, alongside classroom visits. The guest programmer also contextualizes the series in a monograph, which consists of essays and interviews with the filmmakers. This monograph is available for free in various venues throughout downtown Columbia and is also posted in its entirety on the True/False website.

Past subjects of Neither/Nor include a selection of Polish filmmakers who used documentary in subversive ways during the Communist era and ‘shockumentary’ filmmakers who relied on the exploitation home video market to fund provocative, political cinema about gun control and colonialism. Last year, Ashley Clark, senior programmer of cinema at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), presented four films from the Black Audio Film Collective, a group of multidisciplinary and multimedia artists whose work reckons with history and memory—particularly as it pertains to colonialist societies and the African diaspora—in ways that are intellectually rigorous, inventive, and expressive.

 

The Academy is supporting this series through a FilmWatch Grant, which also supports the Big Sky Film Institute, Milwaukee Film, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and many others. “This year the Grants are proud to support 51 organizations whose innovative programs reach broad audiences, underserved high school and college students, support mid-career and emerging filmmakers, and engage and enrich their local communities. The Grants also reached out to support several film archives devastated by recent climate events. It is the Grants’ privilege and responsibility to fund organizations, rising and established, that reflect both The Academy’s values and its leadership role in the arts,” said Buffy Shutt, chair of the Academy’s grants committee.

Since its start in 2004, True/False has increasingly investigated the vast, vital slash between True and False by spotlighting documentaries that transcend mere reportage and incorporate the cinematic qualities of fiction filmmaking. True/False will announce more details about Neither/Nor’s 2019 edition in late 2018.

For more information on Neither/Nor, and downloads of previous years’ monographs visit, head here!