.png)
3 hours ago
6 ARTICLE AD
Fresh from winning the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary at Sundance, Seeds will germinate at True/False, the acclaimed documentary festival in Columbia, MO. Brittany Shyne’s film, exploring the experience of Black farmers who till the soil in the South, bows on the festival’s opening night on Thursday, with additional screenings on Friday and on Sunday, the closing night of True/False.
“Seeds is such a beautiful film. It’s one of my absolute favorites in the lineup,” notes True/False Artistic Director Chloé Trayner. “I know I’m not meant to have favorites, but it’s just pure cinema.”
Long before the documentary’s premiere, it earned support from True/False. “Seeds was a part of our Rough Cut Retreat, which we run in partnership with Catapult Film Fund. And so Brittany brought the project to the retreat along with her editor Malika [Zouhali-Worrall], and we spent five days together,” Trayner tells Deadline. “It’s just absolutely breathtaking… You can feel the filmmaker’s fingerprints on every single frame in the film, and it’s so confident and bold in how it kind of plays with structure and time and character and narrative.”
Seeds is emblematic of the kind of documentary filmmaking elevated at True/False. “We’re really invested in supporting creative nonfiction,” Trayner explains. “We’re really interested in authored work and stuff that you can really feel the filmmakers’ hands at play. And that kind of gives us an open church in terms of the subjects of the films and the forms of the films and the emotional journeys of the films.”
The 22nd edition of True/False will showcase dozens of feature and short documentaries hailing from around the world: China, Mongolia, Pakistan, the Middle East, Kenya, Ecuador, Argentina, Mexico, Western and Eastern Europe, and the U.S. among other areas.
“The international [dimension] of the festival was something that when I joined the team four years ago was really important to me,” says Trayner, a U.K. native. “We are a U.S. festival, but for me, I think having a real range of international perspectives in the program is incredibly exciting, both from a curating standpoint, but also from an audience standpoint. A lot of these films will not get a lot of play in North America. And to have them come here and meet our incredible audience and really be welcomed with open arms is something that is really valuable to me as a programmer.”
Trayner adds, “We pride ourselves on really casting our net far and wide and trying to make sure that we’re representing as many different voices as we can in what is actually quite a very concise, limited lineup of only 30 features.”
Two features at True/False devote attention to human experience rarely documented in film: Deaf President Now!, directed by Nyle DiMarco and Oscar winner Davis Guggenheim, and The Silence of My Hands, directed by Manuel Acuña. The latter film, from Mexico, centers on “Rosa and Sai [who] are committed to one another despite distance separating them in this sensory journey spoken entirely in sign language.”
“They’re both just such wonderful, powerful films. They have incredible characters,” comments Trayner. “They both represent the Deaf experience in different ways, cinematically. We were excited to have both of them in our lineup and kind of essentially pose that there is not one way to represent the Deaf community and the Deaf experience.”
The genre of true crime comes in for interrogation in both Predators, from director David Osit, and Zodiac Killer Project, directed by Charlie Shackleton.
“We are really invested in media literacy as an organization,” Trayner observes. “And I think that’s part of why the local audience here is so incredible, because of two decades of really working on media literacy and really encouraging people to think critically about what they’re consuming as audience members and think about how they might be being manipulated and how decisions are being made to create responses within them. Both of those films, to me, are kind of perfect examples of that… I think you can’t watch either Predators or Zodiac Killer Project and not come out and want to talk to everybody about what you just saw… It’s really interesting to delve into ideas of ethics and how these stories are being constructed and how we as audiences are receiving them.”
Several documentaries screening at True/False examine trans lives and Queer experience: the short Tessitura, directed by Lydia Cornett and Brit Fryer, and features Family Album, directed by Laura Casabé, and A Body to Live In, directed by Angelo Madsen.
“For people who travel both from across the country, but also from around the world to Missouri, they have a certain idea of what Missouri is in their mind,” says Trayner. “I’m sure some of those things are accurate, but True/False really flips that on its head because of the incredible local audience that we have here and how welcoming our community is. And now more than ever, it feels so important to be coming together in community and being open to everything… We felt very passionately about making sure that we were holding space for trans and Queer voices here in Missouri where it’s a very contested subject matter.”
Among other highlights:
>Cristina Costantini’s Sally, about the late astronaut Sally Ride who came out only posthumously.
>A Want in Her, director Myrid Carten’s examination of her relationship with her mother, who battles severe alcohol addiction.
>The Dating Game, director Violet Du Feng’s revelatory look at contemporary China and the struggle of men of marrying age, who are greatly outnumbered by women, to find a spouse.
>WTO/99, directed by Ian Bell, offers “a chronicle of the Seattle World Trade Organization protests in 1999, told entirely through firsthand archival video.”
>How Deep Is Your Love, directed by Eleanor Mortimer, in which “scientists explore the mysterious deep sea to collect and name undiscovered species.”
>Middletown, directed by Emmy winners Amanda McBaine and Jesse Moss, who came to True/False last year with Girls State. In their new film, they “breathe life into an enthralling archive of the students of ‘Electronic English,’ a high school media and journalism class [in Middletown, New York] led by an eccentric and inspiring teacher, Fred Isseks.”
True/False is a program of the Rag Tag Film Society. Among its board members is award-winning filmmaker Robert Greene, acclaimed for his innovative examinations of the form of documentary cinema, in such films as Actress [2014], Kate Plays Christine [2016], Bisbee ’17 [2018], and Procession [2021].
“He definitely was a real trailblazer in a lot of the stuff that he was doing 10, 12 years ago that now is very much kind of — if you pitched a film like that to a funder now, they would completely know what you were talking about,” Trayner observes. “Whereas, I’m sure when he was originally making that work, thinking about Actress, which is one of my all-time favorite films, I’m sure people were very confused by what he was trying to do… It’s kind of a wonderful synergy that he is that pioneer in creative nonfiction and is also based in Columbia, Missouri.”
Experimentation and innovation may raise eyebrows in some more traditionalist circles of documentary, but not at True/False. It’s a festival meant to highlight, as Trayner puts it, “the exciting possibilities of nonfiction as an art form rather than necessarily like an education or entertainment output.”
