What to Watch at True/False 2022: The Return of the Indoor Movie-going Experience

After an almost-complete outdoor edition in May 2021, True/False Film Festival, a 19-year long project from Ragtag Film Society, returns for a complete indoor and in-person only experience with prudent safety measures and reduced capacity amid COVID in Columbia, Missouri, nearby the University of Missouri.

As there were more shorts (20) than features (16) last year, there will be 33 features and 20 shorts that offer an all-around viewing experience with various emotions and nuances that provide a partial aspect of the human connection.

It was hard for me to sit criss-cross applesauce on the grass and fight against some cold during outdoor screenings last year. However, with the indoor return, it is tremendous to sit at laid-back couches at Ragtag Cinema and theatrical houses of Rhynsburger Theater, Missouri Theater, and Showtime Theater at the Blue Note in my first T/F since graduating from my alma mater.

Even though I wish I could talk about each film playing in detail, I want to save you time by providing ten programs that you should consider seeing at T/F 2022 as some of these films are still seeking distribution, and you might need to wait in line at the Q to grab a seat for some of these programs.

Award Recipients and Honorees

True/False is known for not having a jury-decided competition program like Sundance, SXSW, etc. It instead focuses on how films can bring people and create dialogue as films are subjective and have no constructive measurements, unlike sports. Here are this year’s honorees.

True Vision Award: Dos Estaciones

This award is the festival’s only artistic merit award as it celebrates the advancements of nonfiction filmmaking. This year’s recipient is T/F alum Juan Pablo Gonzalez and his film Dos Estaciones as it will have its first in-person screenings after its world premiere at the virtual Sundance 2022. The film features the Sundance award-winning performance of Teresa Sánchez (The Chambermaid) as María García, the owner of the tequila factory Dos Estaciones, struggles to maintain her business in Jalisco. Gonzalez, who has a nonfiction background, shot the fiction Dos Estaciones as a documentary where he brought many Jalisco citizens with little to no acting credits to act in the film. In addition, his filmmaking team spent five years visiting the factory to lay a foundation with the community members and collaborating on the type of stories they wanted to make.

The film has beautiful exterior shots in transition between Maria’s storyline. It juxtaposes her character’s arc when she maintains power and control with the empowerment of women-run businesses within a macho-dominated culture. It shows an appreciation of the process of making tequila for its community before it has become celebrity mass consuming brands from Kendall Jenner and Mark Wahlberg, as mentioned in the film’s blog post on Sundance’s website.

Gonzalez’s previous works Las Nubes (a one-take 2018 short) and Caballerango (2019 feature that is 62 min long with 37 shots) will play at the fest as a short and feature program on March 5 at Ragtag Cinema. In addition, Canoa: A Shameful Memory (1976), a scripted film, is shot in a documentary style that is a dramatic reenactment of the San Miguel Canoa Massacre and a film that influences Gonzalez’s filmmaking approach, will play on March 7 at Ragtag Cinema.

True Life Fund: The Territory

The Territory is produced by Darren Aronofsky and directed by Alex Pritz (a cinematographer on 2021 Oscar-shortlisted The First Wave) in his directorial feature debut. It follows the Indigenous Brazillian’s Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau community leaders protecting their land with a slowly declining population of about 200 against farmers and settlers taking over their protected area in the Amazon.

Pritz brought the film to True/False’s Rough Cut Retreat last year as “Untitled Amazon Project” before it won the Audience Choice Award and Special Craft Jury Award in its world premiere at 2022 Sundance’s World Cinema Documentary Competition. Soon after, National Geographic Films acquiring it for a later theatrical release. The film is a collaboration between Pritz and the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau community, with co-cinematographer and executive producer Tangae Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau leading the shoots in the area during the pandemic. Coming from The First Wave, Pritz brings humanity during harsh times and explores the human connection in fighting against internal/external forces within this film. It also has a powerful storytelling use of news footage to heighten the transition between the events on the Amazon and how outsiders are informed of these events as they unfold.

The True Life Fund has been a philanthropic effort at T/F since 2007 to empower the film’s characters and raise money and awareness for their journeys that can at times put their lives at risk in telling their story. This year’s True Life Fund goes to The Territory’s on-screen participants: the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau surveillance team. The funds will help the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau community’s ongoing documentation efforts to preserve indigenous land in the Amazon. You can donate in-person at the film’s screenings during the fest or by texting TLF to 53555 between now and April 30.

Show Me Screening: Let the Little Light Shine

Let the Little Light Shine, executive produced by Steve James and directed by Emmy winner Kevin Shaw, former cinematographer on James's City So Real, will make its world premiere at 2022 T/F before it plays in the 2022 SXSW EDU program. It follows Chicago's elementary school National Teachers Academy's (NTA) students and their parents, staff, and faculty saving their school before city developers and Chicago Public Schools officials make it into a high school. Despite having the top academic programs for elementary schools in the city, NTA is primarily targeted for having a predominantly Black student population as the film unveils CPS officials and city developers' implicit and subtle bias that they do not want to see them excel in Chicago's South Loop.

At first, the film's trailer feels like an educational spinoff of City So Real. Still, it then becomes its own product due to the powerful perseverance and determination from the people at NTA with observational moments such as principal Isaac Alvarez setting a role model example to the students and the experiences from the long-time workers at NTA where they explain how the school's potential death will kill a part of themselves on the inside as they witness and been a part of NTA's history and foundation.

The film will play as part of Ragtag's Film Society and True/False's Show Me screening, a 2nd-year program where it shows Columbia, MO's community with free screenings throughout the year. The screenings display "all the possibilities that shared experiences with film can hold and engage in post-film conversations that move closer to equity, inclusion, and unity," as stated in T/F's announcement of the film's inclusion. On March 5 at the Missouri Theatre, its screening will have an extended Q&A with Shaw and film participants who fought for NTA; NTA principal Isaac Alvarez, NTA student Taylor Wallace, and Elisabeth Greer, a professor at Harold Washington College.

World Premieres

True/False is not known for being a premiere-driven festival as not many distribution deals happen at this fest. Therefore, premiere status is not a high factor to be considered in this destination. Besides Let the Little Light Shine, here are the other films that will have their T/F world premiere.

It Runs in the Family

It Runs in the Family, directed by Victoria Linares Villegas, is a revelation about her family connection to influential Dominican director Oscar Torres from the 1940s and sets her path of playful self-discovery.

This film is Victoria Linares Villegas’s feature directorial debut after having films such as short Cállate Niña that have played in many film festivals in Spanish-speaking countries. This film will have a series of re-enactments starring her family and blurs the lines between her reality and his. In addition, it will play around performance, an aspect emphasized in past T/F films like Bart Layton’s American Animals and many of Robert Greene’s films (e.g., Kate Plays Christine, Bisbee ‘17). These films come from lived experiences, and there are many ways to express one’s truth through the performance of people’s lives when they show themselves committing their lived experiences on camera. The absence of the line between fiction and non-fiction, like Dos Estaciones, will have people being amazed at the tools to express their lives in this world premiere.

After Sherman

After Sherman, directed by Jon-Sesrie Goff, entails land inheritance after the end of the Civil War in South Carolina. It explores how this land inheritance and generational wealth was not properly transferred to previously enslaved people and their descendants in this tale of collective American history.

Goff, a multidisciplinary artist who has previously worked on documentaries Out in the Night (POV) and Evolution of a Criminal (Independent Lens) and a current arts administrator where he makes grants as a Program Officer for the Creativity and Free Expression team at the Ford Foundation, makes his directorial feature debut where he presents his personal connections to the history of South Carolina in this ongoing conflict in the U.S. As stated on the film’s website, one of the connections is his parents being frequent attendees of the Mother Emanuel AME church in Charleston where it is under his father’s supervision. It is a blessing that on June 17, 2015, they left 20 minutes before White supremacist Dylan Roof killed nine parishioners, including Reverend Pinckney.

After this tragedy, his dad would later be an interim pastor at the church. It informs how After Sherman will not just be as specific to Goff, but as a universal tale in how the ramifications of a failed promise of 40 acres and a mule from Gen. Sherman’s Special Orders 15 and safe spaces of land were and are never fully secured for Black communities. Produced by Field of Vision and POV, and with funding from Sundance, IDA, and Black Public Media, this film shows wisdom and a spiritual side of such past stories often presented with violence. His emphasis on film form with multiple techniques and structures makes a solid case to have a notable world premiere at T/F before it plays at the Santa Barbara Film Festival.

Both directors of these two world premieres, Jon-Sesrie Goff (After Sherman) and Victoria Linares Villegas (It Runs in the Family), will participate in a field session on March 5 at the Tiger Hotel to discuss their approach to personal investigations and unearthing unheard narratives from their familial pasts.

Other Films to Consider

Some films have been festival hits that will attract your love for their specialized interests in the arts, social commentary, or are labors of devotion to their passion and craft.

Mija

Directed by four-time Emmy nominee Isabel Castro, one of Filmmaker Magazine's 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2021, Mija follows music manager Doris Muñoz whose undocumented family depends on her ability to launch pop stars. Doris hustles to discover new talent in Chicana singer Jacks when she loses her best client. It will also explore a long-form story of undocumented immigrants as Castro's past work in the matter in written news outlets like NY Times and The Marshall Project do not give a bigger picture in exploring the complexities and nuances of the issue due to the medium’s limitations, as stated in the film’s press kit. With a powerful voiceover from Doris and music from Doris's clients to undercut the financial risks and guilt that first-born American undocumented immigrants' Jacks and Doris bond over to pursue their dreams in this Sundance-premiere film.

Factory to the Workers

Factory To The Workers follows the 10-year struggle of ITAS employees to prevent production shutdown and keep their collective vision alive in this observation documentary. First-time feature director Srđan Kovačević captures the complex interpersonal relationships involved in its day-to-day operations. It subverts the past tropes of films about labor such as American Factory and Harlan County USA by not showing the simple binary of winning and losing Kovacevic lets the worker conflicts unfold and not sides with one group in particular in this middle ground story. It is also seamless in the meaning of time, where the film does not mention the exact dates when the events occur. The absence of dates makes it a timeless film where this can happen anytime of the year. It also has strong motifs of walls and its contents as it represents the history and age of the facility.

Sirens

Sirens follow Lebanon’s first all-female thrash band, Slaves to Sirens. Lilas and her thrash metal bandmates, Shery, Maya, Alma, and Tatyana, attempt to become rockstars while still discovering who they are in the world. Lilas and the members explore the freedom to find their intersectionalities with sexuality and identity without being politicized and sexualized as Middle Eastern women. The central conflict focuses on Lilas and guitarist Shery. They both have a creative partnership in bouncing off one another in their music but have a complicated friendship followed by a previous romance. Executive produced by Natasha Lyonne and Maya Rudolph, Emmy-winning director Rita Baghdadi (City Rising, My Country No More) immerses the viewer in this observation doc that shows how music is in the members’ veins. It becomes a way to display work, passion, and love, even when the odds are against Slaves to Sirens in the music industry, as depicted in this Sundance-premiere film.

Miguel’s War

The Elaine Rehab-directed film, premiered at 2021 Berlinale, explores Miguel, a gay man, during the Lebanese civil war and his immigration to Madrid. After past destructive relationships that led him to a failed suicide, he becomes a conference interpreter in Barcelona. Finally, after 37 years of past traumatic events, Miguel is ready to confront the ghosts that haunt him. This 2021 Teddy award-winning film uses multiple cinematic forms such as animation, theater, and archival footage to offer an experience of healing one's trauma. She will participate in a panel, along with Procession director Robert Greene and Procession collaborator and drama therapist Monica Phinney on March 4 at Reynolds Journalism Institute of how drama therapy and staging scenes dive into deep truths in documentary filmmaking, as part of True False's sponsored Based on a True Story conference that takes place during the fest.

Shorts: Agartha

I love to catch a short program at festivals because not many people have the luxury of making features and other long-form stories continuously. It also informs inspiring storytellers to tell a story in under 40 or even 20 minutes. This program will have five films that focus on language, land, and ancestry featuring various ways and experimentations in expressing each of the filmmakers’ styles.

Kicking the Clouds

T/F, Sundance, and Berlinale alum Sky Hopinka (short Fainting Spells T/F 2019 and feature Małni – Towards the Ocean, Towards the Shore T/F 2020) returns to the fest with his mother’s contextualization of a 50-year-old cassette tape of his great grandmother teaching the Pechanga lesson to his grandmother. It contains his signature experimentation of film and showing cultural languages and generational differences in structural formalism through its music, animated/VFX sequences, and editing. In addition, this film will give audiences new possibilities of cinema by showing the movie with beautiful 16 mm visuals and breaking the barrier of non-English language for audiences to absorb this family drama with moving images.

Death

Coming off of her directorial breakthrough Becoming (2020; Netflix) about First Lady Michelle Obama and The Show (Showtime, 2021) following The Weeknd’s halftime show, Emmy-nominated Nadia Hallgren presents a Black and White adaption of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem Death. Commissioned by LA Opera and shot at Dunbar’s house in Dayton, OH, the film shows how featured musician Tyshawn Sorey seeks humanity as a composer and how the text of Death informs Sorey of the current state of Black life. Hall places Dunbar’s legacy to a larger audience on the screen with eloquent singing from Amanda Lynn Bottoms and shots of crows flying to give abstract meaning for audiences to interpret this adaptation of Death.

The Rightful

This is a world premiere film from director Ana Galizia. Summoning documents, images, and sounds from the archives to connect the past with the present in the struggle for land and water in the Guapiaçu valley region in Brazil. It interrogates archival images, sounds, and documents to connect the history of the region.

Golden Jubilee

IFFR Rotterdam, NYFF, and Blackstar alum Suneil Sanzgiri, one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Film in 2021, question the meanings of heritage, culture, and the remnants of history when his dad navigates a virtual rendering of their ancestral home in Goa, India. Exploring culture, colonization, and personal connections to history are lifelong thematic themes in Sanzgiri’s works, such as his past shorts At Home But Not At Home (2019) and Letter From Your Far-Off Country (2020). It will have his signature blend of 16mm sequences, 3D renders, direct animation, and desktop aesthetics to inform viewers that harm to land perpetuates in different mediums and how Sanzgiri connects the dots from the past to the present with varying modes of filmmaking.

Ikebana

Ikebana makes its U.S. premiere after playing at festivals like IFFR Rotterdam 2022. It is an experimental documentary that reimagines the Japanese art of flower arranging. Connecting different practices and perspectives through its distant cinematography to prevent interruptions from the practitioners and animation, the film witnesses plants as living, permeable vehicles that hold everyday memories and poetics, a language of expression, and a vehicle for memory.

As there are many great films that I did not get to share, you can read and find every short and feature film playing in this year’s lineup, as well as the films’ synopsis and screenings information here. February 18 reelprint episode “Face the Music with Sean Greene” entails Jonah and my thoughts on Fire of Love and Riotsville USA before we knew 2022 True/False’s film lineup. Upcoming March 6 reelprint episode “Do Better, Be Better with Kendrick Smith” composes our thoughts on The Balcony Movie, Vedette, I Didn’t See You There, GES-2, We Met in Virtual Reality, and 2nd Chance.

What To Watch at True/False 2022: The Return of The Indoor Movie-going experience

2022 Based on a True Story Dispatch