Columbia MO’s popular True/False Film Festival celebrates its lucky 13th edition beginning tomorrow, Thursday, March 3, presenting approximately forty new feature documentaries before it wraps on Sunday, March 6. As ever, the event’s lineup offers a carefully curated selection of recent highlights from larger events like IDFA, Toronto, Berlin, and Sundance, as well as a handful of debuts and “secret screenings” of titles that will make their official premieres at other fests in the coming months (and which attendees promise not to reveal publicly). A can’t miss stop on my festival circuit, I’m most looking forward to catching the following new titles over the weekend:
World premieres at this year’s events include: Tony Stone’s PETER AND THE FARM (pictured), which chronicles the decline of a counterculturalist and his Vermont farm; Jessica Dimmock and Christopher LaMarca’s THE PEARL, about four middle-aged transgender women; and Brett Story’s THE PRISON IN TWELVE LANDSCAPES, an essay film exploring America’s mass incarceration epidemic.
Also making an unofficial debut, though as an untitled work-in-progress, is the latest from Ramona Diaz, a portrait of the Philippines’ massive Fabella Hospital maternity ward. This joins other films focused on women, including Julia Pesce’s chronicle of an all-female family get-together, NOSOTRAS · ELLAS; and Manu Gerosa’s look at the intertwined history of his mother and aunt, BETWEEN SISTERS (pictured).
Orthodox Jewish brothers struggling with hoarding are the subjects of Antonio Tibaldi and Alex Lora’s THY FATHER’S CHAIR; while abandoned siblings try to track down their mysterious father in Chelsea McMullan’s MICHAEL SHANNON MICHAEL SHANNON JOHN (pictured).
Other titles on my list include Andreas Horvath’s portrait of former celebrity, HELMUT BERGER, ACTOR (pictured); Molly Reynolds’ exploration of Australia’s outback through the lens of the Aboriginal experience of colonialism, ANOTHER COUNTRY; and Moritz Siebert, Estephan Wagner, and Abou Bakar Sidibé’s immersion into the refugee crisis in Europe, THOSE WHO JUMP.
what (not) to doc 