Adam Curtis will receive this year’s True Vision Award, celebrating his dedication to and advancement of nonfiction filmmaking. This is the only award given out at the fest, and is given this year with the support of Timothy D. McGarity, MD, of Restoration Eyecare. Curtis is the twelfth recipient of the True Vision Award. Each year, the award has been designed and cast in bronze by mid-Missouri sculptor Larry Young.
Over the course of a 20-plus year career at the BBC, Curtis has refined and perfected a unique cinematic approach to history’s savage ironies. His perennial concern is power, specifically the ability to warp systems of thought. Within his incisive, frequently audacious films, commonly narrated by Curtis himself, original interviews are combined with an unmatched command of archival material. Curtis repurposes audio and video from the massive BBC archives into pointed direct citations, whimsical metaphors and abstract cinematic onslaughts. The result is a reshuffling of accepted history that forces us to reexamine dominant narratives. His innovative body of work branches out across other media, with art installation pieces, a cine-rock concert collaboration with the band Massive Attack and a fascinating blog “The Medium and the Message” investigating and illuminating even more video from the past.Â
Curtis has a long friendship with True/False, first attending in 2005 with The Power of Nightmares, a three-part parallel history of neoconservatism and political Islamism, expanding out from the fascinating biographies of the movements’ founders, Leo Strauss and Sayyid Qutb. He returned in 2010 with It Felt Like a Kiss, a radical montage about the American empire, its fading dream set to infectious pop music. With this award, True/False celebrates Curtis’ iconoclastic path in making essay films like no other. His is a voice that’s unmistakable and essential, inspiring both viewers and his peers through his fearless experiments.  (DS)