Nicolas Rapold on the True/False Movie Fest
“WHERE IS YOUR COUNTRY GOING? It’s headed to an abyss, and it may carry the entire world with it,” Vytautas Landsbergis warned Soviet management in 1990, because it tried to strangle a newly unbiased Lithuania within the crib with bluster, blockades, and tanks. Watching this goateed music-professor-turned-leader steer the ship of state by way of the storm in Sergei Loznitsa’s Mr. Landsbergis, it was unattainable not to consider the Russian invasion of Ukraine, even inside the warmhearted Midwestern haven for documentary artwork that’s the True/False Movie Fest, the place company basked within the good vibes of being again after final 12 months’s outdoor version (distant for nonlocals). However the richly realized 246-minute epic of Mr. Landsbergis made the festivities of a sunny Saturday afternoon appear a distant reminiscence. Loznitsa orchestrates gorgeous archival footage (in coloration and black-and-white) to create you-are-there storytelling concerning the Lithuanians’ struggle to free themselves from the USSR, and to physique forth a way of historic forces, all recalling Guzman’s The Battle of Chile and his personal Maidan. (One director in attendance in contrast the movie to a mural.) Departing from his typically durational eye for area, Loznitsa punctuates tense dramas on the streets (vigils, protests, melees) and in authorities places of work with an analytical sit-down interview with Landsbergis. The ninetysomething exactly recounts behind-the-scenes negotiations, the political calculus, and the fervent nationwide temper with the identical affected person fortitude that stymied his opponents. Being a hero with out enjoying the hero, Landsbergis clearly evokes the Ukrainian Loznitsa, who presses for affirmation {that a} glad-handing Gorbachev ordered the army clampdown after the stress valve of perestroika failed. “Welcome to the chief of the pleasant neighboring state,” reads one cheeky signal when the Soviet premier visits.
The scope of element in Mr. Landsbergis underlines the granular effort that democracy requires, at the same time as Russia’s present struggle on Ukraine tried to undo in two weeks the liberty of one other former Soviet state. (Anticipating criticism, at the least one Russian film screened with a gap card itemizing Russian administrators who oppose the invasion; in the meantime, on-line, citizen journalism out of Ukraine has yielded a flood of uncooked imagery to judge.) On their own, the number of Mr. Landsbergis confirmed that True/False, below new administration in its nineteenth version and nonetheless a darling of critics and filmmakers, is holding the road on prizing the craft of nonfiction moviemaking in its many types. This four-day community-beloved occasion at Columbia, Missouri, has gone from being dubbed “a small however important corrective step” to the doc exhibition panorama in these pages eleven years in the past to “the preeminent nonfiction competition” as we speak, per Selection.
This 12 months’s version discovered a number of administrators excavating and grappling with the experiences of relations, typically drawing inspiration from figuring out with them, different instances looking for out new designs for residing. In After Sherman—polyphonic in its use of archival headlines, old-school video superimposition, stop-motion collage, and extra—Jon-Sesrie Goff infuses a tribute to Gullah tradition with ruminations on how his method to race and the world diverges from that of his father, a North Carolina minister whose church suffered a mass capturing however who embraces forgiveness. Victoria Linares Villegas’s equally stressed It Runs within the Household unravels the private and non-private lives of her queer Dominican cousin, Oscar Torres, a filmmaker (and critic), piecing out his persecuted path and making an attempt on his phrases by staging his screenplays. Aliona van der Horst’s Flip Your Physique to the Solar additionally channels the ghost of a thwarted creative spirit (on this case associated to not the director however to a girl whose father was imprisoned in a gulag) with the assistance of colorized footage. These works felt like explorations not simply of the themes, however of how their experiences may or couldn’t be formed and conjured into a movie.
That stated, the episodic pageant of The Balcony Film felt like a extra instantly profitable experiment, as Poland’s Pawel Lozinski turns his digital camera on the pavement under the window of his second-floor condominium. Primarily asking folks “What’s your story,” Lozinski tweaks the age-old vox-pop components: He speaks from his residence, fostering a neighborly intimacy with strangers and an interesting absurdity, whereas the downward angle creates a contemplative highlight as passersby cock their heads to reply his surprising questioning. Some mirror, others flip the tables and dissect his motives. There’s a feminist undertow to those interactions, which hold returning to ladies’s tales of newfound independence or of being held again by the lads of their lives; that strand, and crude homophobic nationalism, remind us that some legacies die exhausting. Tales emerge, evolve, or don’t: An aged lady says, improbably, that she has nothing to share; a self-proclaimed younger fashionista boasts of limitless social media plans; a panhandling ex-con, certainly one of Lozinski’s repeat guests, finds a tiling job however can’t shake a malaise.
The place Are We Headed offered an equally positive pageant (that includes Russian Victory Day celebrations) in its gorgeously photographed tour of Moscow subwaygoers (certainly one of a lot of titles plucked from final 12 months’s robust IDFA line-up, together with Mr. Landsbergis and a heart-stopping Vietnamese debut characteristic about wife-kidnapping, Youngsters of the Mist). One other spotlight of True/False’s curation is its shorts packages, the place I noticed a haunting collection of audio-driven recollections of the Yugoslav Tribunal by traumatized interpreters (Eliane Esther Bots’s In Circulation of Phrases), an apocalyptic dispatch on the simulacrum that offers “digital first” an ominous new ring (Deniz Tortum and Kathryn Hamilton’s Our Ark), and the woebegone, semi-slo-mo ballad of a Manitoba beast and the trash dump that received’t love him again (Nuisance Bear, from Jack Weisman and Gabriela Osio Vanden). There was additionally the requisite problematic movie, Helmut Dosantos’s Gods of Mexico, whose spectacular tableaux of Indigenous folks really feel inextricable from century-old traditions of ethnographic gazes. Lastly, Srđan Kovačević’s Manufacturing facility to the Employees offered an ideal slice of anguished verité as a collective-run machine device plant struggles to flee the dual dying spirals of a mismanaging government clinging to energy and moribund money stream. Subsequent to that fading dream of communal endeavor, the pleasures of gathering at True/False felt that rather more candy and very important.
The nineteenth True/False Movie Fest ran from March 3 to March 6.