By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Doc Fest True/False 2015 Announces Full Programming

Posted Thursday, February 18th, 2016 - Comments Off on Doc Fest True/False 2015 Announces Full Programming
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The 2016 True/False Film Festival  Runs March 3-6
Nation’s Premiere Documentary Festival Returns for 13th Year
“My love for True/False runs deep – from the smart programming, passionate audiences, inspired buskers, and fabulous venues.”  – Laura Poitras
“True/False is nirvana. When I went to True/False, I remembered what I sometimes forget: the unalloyed joy of making and watching docs.” – Alex Gibney

“In just nine years, True/False has become not only the premier documentary showcase in America but the most purely enjoyable film event in the world.”
– Joe Williams, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
March 3rd-March 6th marks the 13th installment of the True/False Film Festival, a four-day celebration of nonfiction filmmaking and filmgoing, in which filmmakers, artists, musicians and others remake the mid-sized college town of Columbia, Missouri into a one-of-a-kind utopia. The transformative, rambunctious, ecstatic experience of T/F creates a cathartic journey that forces participants to do nothing less than to re-imagine reality.
Originally founded by festival organizers David Wilson and Paul Sturtz in 2004 to celebrate that year’s new wave of exciting and cinematic documentaries, the festival has grown tenfold into the most beloved showcase for nonfiction cinema in the world, welcoming practically every major documentary filmmaker into its doors. Out of this year’s 5 nominees for the Academy Award® for Best Documentary, 3 played at last year’s festival (CARTEL LAND, THE LOOK OF SILENCE and WHAT HAPPENED, MISS SIMONE?).
**For all press inquiries, including interviews with filmmakers, festival co-directors David Wilson & Paul Sturtz, or programmer Chris Boeckmann & Pamela Cohn, please contact Charlie Olsky, charlie@cineticmedia.com**
 
This Year’s Festival
For the 13th installment of the True/False Film Fest, we’re leaving the comfort of the well-trod path and heading Off the Trail. This year, we’re surrounding ourselves with the inspiration of secret missions, treasure maps, personal geographies, and the virtue of being lost. Through our films, music, conversations, art, and design, come explore with us a variety of special, hidden, and sacred places, both real and constructed.
Several films are celebrating their debuts at True/False. The Pearl takes a sensitive look at gender through the eyes of four middle-aged trans women. The Prison In Twelve Landscapes is an impressionistic essay film about the prison-industrial complex. In Peter and the Farm, we unearth a rural tragedy in Vermont.
2016 also brings a marked increase in international titles, including films from China, Iran, Iraq, Australia, Argentina, and the Philippines. Discoveries includeThose Who Jump, a landmark collaboration between two German filmmakersand first-time co-director Abou Bakara Sidibé about migrants seeking to scale the fences that separate Africa from Europe. Thy Father’s Chair isset in a transcendently messy Brooklyn apartment. From Argentina comes the intimate family story Nosotras·Ellas. Other films include Behemoth, a staggering journey through Inner Mongolia’s ravaged grasslands; Another Country(Australia), a guided tour of the outback; Between Sisters (Italy),in which a long-buried family secret is excavated; Helmut Berger, Actor about an uneasy relationship between subject and filmmakerand Michael Shannon Michael Shannon John (Canada),which seeks to locate a father who abandoned his family.
Fresh from Sundance comes director Roger Ross Williams’ inspiring, true-life fairy tale Life, Animated, which will play as the fest’s Jubilee film. Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You is Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady’s fresh spin on the celebrity bio-pic. And the layered and revelatory Tickled transcends its silly subject matter. Coming from their Toronto film festival launches are Presenting Princess Shaw about an unlikely musical collaboration; Sherpa, an adventure film with a political conscience; and The Music of Strangers from Oscar-winning® T/F favorite Morgan Neville (Twenty Feet From Stardom).
As part of the fest’s commitment to the cutting edge of nonfiction, True/False is embracing films that experiment with content and form. Titles include Deborah Stratman’s first feature, The Illinois Parables, Roberto Minervini’s The Other Side, Robert Greene’s Kate Plays Christine, and Sergio Oksman’sO Futebol.
2016’s previously announced True Vision Award recipient, Mehrdad Oskouei, will be appearing with a couple of films including his newest, Starless Dreams, set in a rehabilitation center in Tehran. Also previously announced as the recipient of our True Life Fund, Sonita follows Sonita Alizadeh, a young Afghan rapper.
Also previously announced for the 2016 Neither/Nor series, the archival program of films that muddles the borders between fiction and nonfiction, True/False Film Fest is collaborating with film critic Nick Pinkerton on a series exploring Mondo cinema. Films in this series include the critically acclaimed Des Morts (1979), as well as cult documentary classics Mondo Cane (1962), The Killing of America (1981), and Africa Addio (1966).
2016 FEATURE SLATE
 
Short titles can be found at http://truefalse.org/program/shorts
 
Another Country (dir. Molly Reynolds)
Aboriginal movie star David Gulpilil is our sardonic tour guide to the outback, where his people maintain a strong sense of history against creeping cultural imperialism.
The Bad Kids (dirs. Keith Fulton, Louis Pepe)
At an isolated, alternative high school, a firebrand principal tests the limits of tough love working with teenagers considered to be lost causes.
Behemoth (dir. Zhao Liang)
With restrained anger, Chinese filmmaker Zhao Liang brings us on a staggering journey into a modern-day Dante’s Inferno, the pitch-black mines of Inner Mongolia.
Between Sisters (dir. Manu Gerosa)
Teresa and Ornella are sisters utterly devoted to one another despite a deeply buried secret between them.
Cameraperson (dir. Kirsten Johnson)
A profoundly compassionate globe-trotting memoir from behind the camera, bearing witness to the highs and lows of the human experience.
Fear of 13 (dir. David Sington)
Death row inmate Nick Yarris has the presence and poise of a Shakespearean thespian. But can he be believed?
Helmut Berger, Actor (dir. Andreas Horvath)
The most beautiful actor of his day is now a glorious wreck, and a trip to St. Tropez won’t cure his ills.
Homeland (Iraq Year Zero) (dir. Abbas Fahdel)
This landmark epic is an immersive profile of one Iraqi family before and after the 2003 occupation.
The Illinois Parables (dir. Deborah Stratman)
Archival and original 16mm footage mesh with visionary sound design, as the singular Deborah Stratman tells a counter-narrative to how the Midwest was won.
Jim: The James Foley Story (dir. Brian Oakes)
Memorializing James Foley, a photojournalist who rushed both headlong and heroically into war zones.
Kate Plays Christine (dir. Robert Greene)
This artifice-spiked detective story follows rising movie star Kate Lyn Sheil down a rabbit hole inspired by Christine Chubbuck, a Sarasota newscaster who met a tragic end.
The Land of the Enlightened (dir. Pieter-Jan De Pue)
A boy’s life, Afghani style, as a merry band of marauders extort, scavenge, and traverse a beautiful, bombed-out dreamscape.
The Last Days of Winter (dir. Mehrdad Oskouei)
The precursor to Starless Dreams – seven young Iranian detainees spill their secrets and their passions to True Vision award winner Mehrdad Oskouei.
Life, Animated (dir. Roger Ross Williams)
An enchanted, inspiring, true-life fairy tale: Owen Suskind struggles to speak until he finds his eccentric mentors, a band of Disney sidekicks.
Michael Shannon Michael Shannon John (dir. Chelsea McMullan)
Canadian siblings seek to solve the mystery of their father’s disappearance – and learn what fate befell this charming rogue.
The Music of Strangers (dir. Morgan Neville)
Superstar cellist Yo-Yo Ma and his Silk Road Ensemble are on an uplifting mission to connect the world through music.
Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You (dirs. Heidi Ewing, Rachel Grady)
Sitcom king Norman Lear single-handedly revolutionized television. But what has he done lately?
Nosotras·Ellas (dir. Julia Pesce)
Julia Pesce tenderly films her family’s intimate moments – nine women sharing a summer idyll in Argentina.
O Futebol (dir. Sergio Oksman)
A reunited father and son seek an elusive epiphany during the 2014 World Cup in São Paulo.
The Other Side (dir. Roberto Minervini)
Addiction, bigotry, and zealotry are set against the abiding love of family in the rubbed-raw intimacy of Roberto Minervini’s latest.
The Pearl (dirs. Jessica Dimmock and Christopher LaMarca)
In a world far from glossy magazines featuring Laverne Cox, four middle-aged transgender women struggle to find recognition, refuge, and love.
Peter and the Farm (dir. Tony Stone)
Back-to-the-lander Peter Dunning has become one with his Vermont farm, perched somewhere between paradise and hell.
Presenting Princess Shaw (dir. Ido Haar)
Singer-songwriter Princess Shaw aspires to greatness, but is anyone listening?
The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (dir. Brett Story)
This impressionistic, piercing essay reveals a prison-industrial complex tightly woven into the the fabric of American life.
Secret Screening Aqua
The director recovers his castaway childhood by drawing on a vast archive of videotapes.
Secret Screening Navy
This blood-boiling essay about technology run amok pivots from bedrooms to backrooms.
Secret Screening Scarlet
Every emotion heightened, every moment vital, every connection new and electric.
Sherpa (dir. Jennifer Peedom)
In this visually soaring adventure, a tragic Mt. Everest avalanche exposes the relentless strains placed upon the guides.
Sonita (dir. Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami)
Dead-set against being sold as a bride, a feisty Afghan refugee breaks loose to become a rapper.
Starless Dreams (dir. Mehrdad Oskouei)
In this emotionally charged masterpiece, a group of underage female convicts dream of escaping the detention center and returning to their families.
Those Who Jump (dirs. Moritz Siebert, Estephan Wagner and Abou Bakar Sidibé)
In the mountain range between Morocco and Spain, thousands of men prepare to scale the imposing fences that stand between them and Europe.
Thy Father’s Chair (dirs. Antonio Tibaldi and Alex Lora)
Twins Abraham and Shraga are prisoners of all the dreck piled high around their Brooklyn apartment – until concerned neighbors intercede.
Tickled (dirs. David Farrier and Dylan Reeve)
This news-of-the-weird story about a fringe sport morphs into a twisty tale of obsession, exploitation, sex, and blackmail.
Untitled Ramona Diaz Project – Work in Progress
From kangaroo moms to lost babies, there are dozens of stories in the world’s largest maternity ward.
Weiner (dirs. Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg)
This raucous, fast-paced profile gets up close and personal as it encounters the exploits of dethroned New York politician Anthony Weiner.

 

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon