True/False Fest 2026: Time Journey

Movies are a form of time machine. You stroll right into a theater and also you’re transported elsewhere—a parallel universe, one other time, one other place. By their very nature, motion pictures collapse and dilate time, giving us total lives and tales and other people over the span of some brief hours.

Going to a movie competition appears like touring by means of a number of intervals of time unexpectedly. You arrive, settle in, dip into a brand new perspective, and reemerge from the theater solely to go proper again in once more. Repeat a number of occasions a day, for a number of days. By the top of the fest, you’ll really feel feral, unstuck in time; the actual world retains transferring alongside you nevertheless it doesn’t actually appear to exist, even within the moments between screenings.

The actual world nonetheless insists upon itself anyway, particularly at documentary movie festivals like True/False. So lots of the motion pictures I noticed at the festival this year had been involved with human perceptions of time, with reminiscence, and with legacy. Just a few documentaries performed with notion utilizing formal filmmaking selections—a visualization of a protagonist’s psychological state, for instance, or the layering of archival and impressionistic footage to signify reminiscence. Just a few poked on the boundaries of reality and actuality, stretching our notion of what really occurred in an effort to categorical the reality because it feels, even when the precise occasions didn’t precisely occur that means. Time collapses to a degree in these movies, eradicating the notion of linear expertise in favor of a mannequin of time that doubles and triples again over itself. In a world the place actuality is warped by fascism and generative AI, telling imaginatively true tales about actual folks is particularly essential.

One of the cornerstones of this 12 months’s competition was Remake, Ross McElwee’s follow-up to his 1985 breakout documentary Sherman’s March. The earlier movie had been supposed to hint the trail of Union General William Tecumseh Sherman as he lower a swath throughout the South on the finish of the American Civil War. We get traces of that historical past from McElwee, who showcases the wealthy, sophisticated textures of life within the American South by means of his topics’ offhand feedback, the best way they toss off traces about what they consider to be inerrant and true. McElwee’s personal loneliness—additionally a tossed-off incidental at first—insists on making itself identified all through the image till ultimately it turns into all the level. He retains making detours as he will get to know a half-dozen or so ladies, one after the other, all through his travels. Sherman’s March is a form of ur-text of the documentary as private essay, a pattern-setter for later documentarians like John Wilson and Sandi Tan to comply with. Remake catches maintain of McElwee’s present-day anxieties and refracts them by means of his ever-present handheld digicam. Remake is ostensibly involved with documenting the artistic technique of remaking Sherman’s March as a fiction movie, although the film swiftly strikes on to different, extra urgent issues.

As with the unique, the inciting incident shortly falls away when McElwee’s consideration turns towards the life and demise of his son Adrian. “Something goes awry, off-script. You’re gone,” McElwee says to his son in voiceover; the documentary is a reminiscence palace and mausoleum, layered with stunning and painful recollections. McElwee’s enhancing juxtaposes recollections of Adrian as a small baby, keen to talk to the digicam, with footage Adrian shot as a younger man in his mid-twenties, fighting habit and hoping to make it lengthy sufficient to grow to be a filmmaker himself. In the midst of an argument, McElwee fingers his digicam over to Adrian, actually and figuratively turning the lens on his personal shortcomings as a father. The most affecting sequence intercuts McElwee’s archival footage of his younger son with movers taking containers and furnishings out of his home, linking previous and current to the physique of labor of a single man who doesn’t perceive precisely the place all of it went improper, however who understands that he failed his son, in some way, and who now solely has his filmmaking capacity to grapple with each the grief and the footage he’d taken. In one elegant shot, McElwee approaches a espresso store from the road, filming his son by means of the large plate-glass window as he works on his personal pc. McElwee’s reflection layers over Adrian’s face, digicam overlapping Adrian’s pc, two unhappy and damaged males separated by time and demise, solely capable of perceive one another by means of an intermediated format, and even then, solely imperfectly. The tragedy is caustic and painful and breathtaking; it hangs over my head for the remainder of the competition.

The Oldest Person within the World (dir. Sam Green) takes a considerably related private tack, albeit much less efficiently. It’s a self-conscious examination of Green’s personal fears and anxieties, triggered partially by his personal obsession with the fabulously outdated. When he learns that the oldest particular person on this planet occurs to reside only a few subway stops away, he seeks her out. Interviewing her seems to be troublesome—she spends most of her time asleep—however spending time along with her turns into a type of catalyst for his filmmaking. The oldest particular person on this planet not often holds on to the title for lengthy; very outdated folks have a behavior of passing away. Green makes a behavior of catching up with the oldest particular person on this planet’s successors, visiting each, asking them the identical questions. Some are sleepy, others exhausting of listening to; one vigorous girl from Jamaica named Violet tells tales about her elementary faculty English trainer who instructed her to “catch and hold” a poem, which she then proceeds to recite from reminiscence greater than 100 years after she’d first realized it. Green appears to take pleasure in accumulating his outdated folks, ruminating together with them about his seek for the reply to a query that he’s by no means fairly happy with. At one level he pauses to edit in a montage of flowers and water and human achievements, calling the sequence a “seventh-inning stretch,” a respite from the heaviness of the remainder of the documentary. It feels as if he’s shying away, passing alongside accountability to the aged folks in entrance of his digicam; he concludes with footage of his younger son operating, and muses that maybe his baby might choose up the digicam and keep it up the undertaking after he himself is gone, a form of filmmaker’s inheritance that by no means questions the burden of expectation this may place on his personal baby.

The query of inheritance haunts Gatorville (dir. Freddie Gluck), a brief about two kids being raised on a gator farm in Colorado. Their dad and mom take care of 170-something gators that inhabit the pure sizzling spring on their land, alongside a menagerie of different reptiles and animals. Both kids are homeschooled, a protection mechanism in opposition to being picked on by different kids for dwelling in an uncommon setting. The older daughter is ambivalent about her lot; her youthful sibling is extra desperate to please, much less positive about his personal preferences and id simply but. “You’re not one person forever,” the older baby tells us; the particular person she hopes to be stays a query mark past the horizon. Gatorville was programmed instantly earlier than Nuisance Bear (dir. Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman), which follows a younger polar bear trapped near humanity by the shortage of sea ice. Desperate for meals, the bear turns to scavenging the rubbish dumps close to Churchill in Manitoba, the self-styled “Polar Bear Capital of the World.” Tourists flock to see the bears of their pure habitat, the movie acutely aware of the truth that they’re encroaching into the bears’ territory, large armored buses pushing into an more and more heat and inhospitable tundra. When a bear is noticed, the vacationers swarm the bus home windows, clustering round tripods that steadiness telephoto lenses, the lengthy grey cameras clicking and buzzing like a cloud of flies. Tourists are made to be like animals; the bear on the middle of their consideration is made out to be just a little too human. In the movie’s makes an attempt to make the bear’s plight vivid, the movie slips into anthropomorphization, presenting the bear’s curiosity as one thing that connects it to the human beings who’re so focused on it, and framing the bear as nearly unrepentant when it’s ultimately caught and brought to “polar bear jail,” its head lowered whereas the bars slam shut. When the bear pushes additional north into Nunavut, its destiny is held equal with the Inuit townspeople whose lives are affected by local weather change, too.

The kids in School for Defectors (dir. Jeremy Workman, who made final 12 months’s Secret Mall Apartment) are additionally affected by circumstances past their management. They attend a tiny boarding faculty in South Korea designed to assist acclimate the kids of defectors from North Korea to a democratic society. Academics are much less essential to the lecturers than serving to their costs grow to be upright, form individuals in society, and the documentary is form to its topics, celebrating their triumphs and rooting for them as they search to develop their very own identities and perceive the burden of the selections their dad and mom made. Even with the burden of that household historical past, School for Defectors skims the floor, selecting to remain gentle. Heavier and deeper is the strategy in Leah Galant’s Landscapes of Memory, which chronicles her time finding out the Holocaust and reminiscence tradition in Germany. Galant, a Jewish girl, wrestles with the extent of significance layered on to considered one of historical past’s ugliest occasions; her household at dwelling saved pre-Holocaust mementoes in a field labeled “unimportant documents,” whereas Germany continues to erect memorials to the victims of the Holocaust. Galant movies the set up of a “stumbling stone” memorial and notes the presence of others round her metropolis, together with a pair commemorating a pair who fled to Palestine within the Nineteen Thirties as antisemitism unfold all through Germany. She then attracts a line from Germany’s reminiscence tradition to the nation’s staunch help of the state of Israel, to the purpose of refusing to permit protests in opposition to the genocide in Gaza. Galant’s documentary questions the aim of reminiscence for reminiscence’s sake: if German reminiscence tradition and penitence for the Holocaust results in implicit help for an additional genocide mere a long time later, than of what assistance is the reminiscence, and of what use are the phrases?

If Landscapes of Memory is a meditation in regards to the reverberating penalties of reminiscence for reminiscence’s sake, American Doctor (dir. Poh Si Teng) is a plainspoken, easy verité-style documentary that grapples with the acutely aware cultural choice to actively neglect atrocity even because it’s being dedicated. The documentary follows three medical doctors as they put together to return to Gaza as humanitarian volunteers, the place they deal with the sick and the wounded as bombs fall round them. They report that the variety of wounded, mutilated, and murdered kids alone is unconscionable. “You pixelate this, that’s journalistic malpractice,” says one of many medical doctors when Teng says she intends to not embody the images he’s taken of lifeless Palestinian kids. He’s offended, and for good purpose: he took an oath to deal with the sick and protect life, his authorities helps the obliteration of life, and his fellow residents would like to not even find out about any of it. Teng’s movie is simply as offended because the medical doctors who function its topics, deservedly so.

What Comes from Sitting in Silence? (dir. Sophie Schrago) is known as for a pronouncement by its central protagonist, Judge Khatoon, a girl who based a Sharia court docket in Mumbai. Her intention is to assist ladies struggling of their marriages; she sees {couples} who can’t cease preventing, ladies who really feel beleaguered by their in-laws, and people who find themselves fed up and need to divorce, and she or he works to assist them keep collectively or separate, no matter every case dictates. Schrago retains her digicam tucked away to the facet of the tiny courtroom, a fly on the wall watching every part. Judge Khatoon listens as her purchasers plead their instances for themselves, urging the ladies to talk up, as a result of to remain silent is to simply accept issues as they’re. Khatoon is a reassuring presence, even once I don’t perceive or agree along with her rulings; her intention is to restore the connection, and Schrago retains discovering methods to underline the humanity of everybody who walks by means of Khatoon’s door. Khatoon sings whereas she’s ready for purchasers; she urges feuding spouses to feed one another chocolate; and she or he calls for that the boys who’ve been taken to court docket grant their wives the respect they deserve, even when the husbands themselves seem to be misplaced causes. She retains a whiteboard tallying the numbers of all of the instances she’s had—the quantity that resolved in divorce, the quantity that led to reconciliation. There’s no such factor as a misplaced trigger, her follow says, however redemption solely comes when it’s requested for. To keep silent is to let that hope die on the vine.

In Pinball (dir. Naveen Chaubal), Yusuf, the kid of Iraqi refugees, is feeling his means into the American experiment; when he asks his father why his household selected to settle in “Kentucky, of all places,” it’s the criticism of somebody who’s been compelled to maneuver with no say in his vacation spot, nevertheless it’s additionally the criticism of each teenager who’s ever questioned their dad and mom’ choices. Yusuf is ambivalent about his adopted tradition, unsure in regards to the American Dream.  Pinball is a portrait of cultural and bodily displacement, a personality examine focused on assembly its topic in the midst of his quiet dissatisfaction. That positioning might be sometimes irritating—as an early twenty-something, Yusuf doesn’t appear to know fairly what he needs moreover not this, and the documentary is comfy sitting in that discomfort with little to anchor it in place. The anchor factors we do get are expressive prospers: as Yusuf meditates to calm his anxious thoughts, we see him wading into the ocean close to sundown, his head slipping beneath the pounding surf. Because the picture is so divorced from his dwelling in small-town Kentucky, it’s jarring. Only after Yusuf himself begins to claim his wishes for his future does the selection make sense. The flip results in a realignment of every part that got here earlier than, a sudden flash of understanding, a snapping into place—the form of epiphany about place and belonging that the majority of us can solely dream of getting.

How to Clean a House in Ten Easy Steps (dir. Carolina Gonzalez Valencia) follows the identical imaginative strategy, albeit with extra flights of fancy and extra filmmaking methods at its disposal. It appears like throwing a number of issues on the wall to see what sticks; the documentary might need been served higher if it had picked one approach and cooked it all through. Valencia makes use of the movie to assemble an imagined portrait of her mom Beatriz, who’d moved to the United States from Colombia to work as a housecleaner. That a lot is true, however the documentary activates a conceit that wonders what might need occurred if Beatriz had written a bestselling guide about her expertise. It’s an attention-grabbing idea, one that might work higher if the movie trusted it sufficient to face by itself. Instead, the documentary retains switching methods: an animated flashback, a staged interview, even a music video sequence. Each of the person items are charming, however none of them fairly cohere; it’s as if the movie retains making an attempt on identities to see if one other will match higher.

Mary Oliver: Saved by the Beauty of the World (dir. Sasha Waters) is extra expansive and cohesive. If you understand Mary Oliver’s poetry, you understand about her wild geese and her grasshoppers, the deceptively easy readability of her language and the best way she refuses to cover what her poems are about from the outset. This documentary is an ordinary biography, full with sluggish zooms on black-and-white images of the poet as a younger girl, interspersed with speaking heads who alternate between singing Oliver’s praises and reciting her poetry. Some of these speaking heads are poets—former Poet Laureate of the United States Ada Limón makes an look—whereas others are cultural figures like Lucy Dacus and Stephen Colbert (who can’t get by means of “The Summer Day” with out being lowered to tears). John Waters, who’d been a great good friend of Oliver and her late accomplice Molly Cook, presents much-needed irreverence, with out which the documentary may grow to be hagiographic. It’s enamored of its topic, constructing itself to a climax structured round her most well-known poem, “Wild Geese,” a portrait that’s maybe a contact too neat for a poet who collected and organized the imperfectness of nature into crystal clear traces. 

“I’m a scribbler—I catch hold of what I’m given,” says Oliver, a line that coincidentally harmonizes with Violet from The Oldest Person within the World reciting a poem a trainer had instructed her to “catch hold” of a long time earlier than. The protagonist of Barbara Forever (dir. Brydie O’Connor) was additionally a scribbler—the groundbreaking lesbian experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer—who put every part about herself, together with her personal bare physique, into her artwork. O’Connor makes an attempt to sum up Hammer’s life, work, and legacy. Where her documentary excels is in its entry to the footage shot by Barbara herself, who was prolific and joyfully passionate about her artwork, which she considered as inseparable from her intercourse life. The movies she made had been about her lovers and her exes, a means of preserving herself and her relationships in the meanwhile they occurred, a solution to assert that she was as soon as right here, and a solution to maintain her reminiscence alive lengthy after she’s gone.

The documentary Seized (dir. Sharon Liese) takes the form of a great old school revenge story, the sort set in a small city the place interpersonal ties are tight and recollections—and grudges—run lengthy. Liese retells the story of the Marion County Record, a neighborhood newspaper that was raided in 2023 by the native sheriff’s workplace in a blatant abuse of judicial energy. The raid sparked nationwide outrage, fueled by the truth that the paper’s co-owner and writer, 98-year-old Joan Meyer, died of stress the day afterward. Her son Eric (the paper’s editor-in-chief) takes it upon himself to combat the abuse, and Liese’s documentary picks up the threads of the combat one 12 months after the raids, simply because the newspaper finds its personal sense of equilibrium. Despite the implications of the raid—and the First Amendment rights hanging within the steadiness of the following court docket battle—Liese tells the story with a humorousness, following the paper’s cub reporter round city as he adjusts to small-town life. The total movie feels a bit gossipy; the raid had been touched off by a petty feud between former finest associates, the form of unhealthy blood that’s enjoyable to dish about. (One of the speaking heads within the documentary is given the title “ex-best friend” once we first meet her, a contact that made all the viewers in my screening roar.) Seized is the form of documentary that has a transparent arc and a definitive hero within the type of a scrappy free press, a enjoyable experience with simply sufficient chunk to really feel significant.

If Seized is a newspaper digest, Phenomena (dir. Josef Gatti) is a espresso desk guide, a respite from the heavier matters that pervade the remainder of the competition. Gatti determined to make the movie after gaining a newfound appreciation for science. His movie, which is split into ten temporary chapters, feels surface-level, a primer on the constructing blocks of the universe. But what a primer! Each part of the movie explores a special drive of nature, from gentle to gravity to entropy, with each particular person phenomenon illustrated in high-resolution pictures in intense close-up. Gatti lovingly movies cleaning soap bubbles, explosions of coloured powder, and chemical reactions, showcasing every in opposition to alternating black and white backgrounds whereas digital dance music performs. He isn’t within the intricacies of math, nor does he do a lot to elucidate the forces he’s showcasing—simply sufficient for us to get the gist that the world round us is basically neat, and that he’s discovered a cool solution to exhibit it.

In my favourite wanting the competition, Division (dir. James Paul Dallas) chronicles a short afternoon spent divvying up books. Dallas is in another person’s condo, sifting by means of the bookshelves of a good friend, holding up his cellphone in order that they will see the titles and make their selections. In quarter-hour, we hear tales about books and the circumstances that introduced them to their proprietor; now, the proprietor should make troublesome choices from a distance about what to maintain and what to cull. Dallas sounds just like the world’s most supportive good friend, the form of one that will go to an ex’s condo so that you just don’t should breathe the identical air. Most of the documentary resides within the unusual half-life of an amicable breakup, the sort the place exes depart a few of their belongings behind in every others’ residences as mementoes. Only on the finish will we come to know: this isn’t a breakup, it’s exile. These books aren’t mementoes, they’re lifelines, being chosen for a protracted journey throughout an more and more hostile border towards somebody who could by no means get to return.

Division conveniently performed earlier than considered one of my favourite documentaries of the competition, Martina Matzkin and Gabriela Uassouf’s Cuidadoras (Care). Like so many different documentaries at this 12 months’s competition, Cuidadoras spends its time within the firm of outdated folks. The movie follows three transgender care staff—Maia, Yenifer, and Luciana—at a nursing dwelling in Argentina, portray nails vivid pink, making beds, spooning soup into aged mouths. Matzkin and Uassouf watch life on the dwelling with light curiosity, lending the residents the identical care and respect provided to them by their caretakers, content material to easily observe. Life in a nursing dwelling has its personal rhythms, grooves worn into ongoing day by day life by the habits of outdated folks. In one stolen shot, we see an aged man and girl sitting in silence side-by-side within the solar on an outside bench, elevating their cigarettes to their lips in tandem. The aged women and men round them deal with Maia, Yenifer, and Luciana politely, although they’re by no means fairly sure what to do about their caretakers’ pronouns. Still, the residents and caretakers clearly love one another, with the residents dishing out recommendation about life and love and even intercourse. One of them tells Maia to get out of a nasty relationship; one other advises her caretaker that she “has to take care of [herself].” We don’t understand how a lot love we’re able to till it’s given to us, freely and with out judgment. Cuidadoras gently showcases the precise form of care that might be an honor to present and to obtain.

Aanikoobijigan [ancestor/great-grandparent/great-grandchild] (dir. Adam and Zack Khalil) takes the identical form of care in showcasing the trouble to revive First Nations ancestors again to the earth the place they belong. The Khalil brothers deliberately select to not present pictures of the stays of the deceased, pixelating and blurring them out of respect for his or her reminiscence. They’ve been on show in museums and hidden in museum vaults—“prisons,” because the documentary calls them—for the consumption of colonial eyes for lengthy sufficient. It’s a selection motivated by the identical intuition that drives the filmmakers of American Doctor to not pixelate their very own pictures: completely different occasions and circumstances, however the actuality of genocide and historical past, each enabled by the actions of the American authorities, nonetheless rhyme. Aanikoobijigan units out a mannequin of time structured in a spiral, the place previous, current, and future can contact, and the place the lifeless deserve the identical dignity and consideration afforded to the dwelling.

Powwow People (dir. Sky Hopinka) presents a snapshot of a single night, roaming the grounds of a powwow in Seattle because the powwow season attracts to a detailed. Many of the individuals know one another (the MC takes alternatives to razz a couple of in between bulletins). Hopinka’s digicam circles the dance in a sluggish spiral, at all times on the transfer, by no means actually stopping to relaxation on anybody dancer. The rhythm takes some getting used to; Powwow People isn’t about showcasing anybody dance. Instead, the documentary is in regards to the feeling of being at a powwow, weaving out and in of focus, listening to the drummers and singers and catching sight of the sweat, observing the motion and regalia of the individuals with out making an attempt to seize it in its entirety. The undertaking is grounded firmly within the current second, permitting the dancers to talk to their want to protect cultural reminiscence and to proceed to evolve into the long run, with out asking anybody to justify or clarify their very own presence or participation.

If many of the documentaries on the competition are weaving spirals, Tropical Park (dir. Hansel Porras Garcia) seems to be a straight line: a uncommon fictional narrative function on the documentary movie competition, filmed in a single take from a single vantage level. We watch from the again seat of a automobile as two middle-aged siblings get in, drive to a close-by park, interact in a driving lesson, then drive again. There and again once more, a small journey by means of a nook of Miami, the form of factor on a regular basis folks do on a regular basis. For all its unusual simplicity, the film can be a feat of character constructing and improvisation: the extra the siblings discuss, the extra we come to know the elemental variations and similarities between them. Lead actors Lola Bosch and Ariel Texidó achieve this a lot with their backs to the digicam, and all of it feels pure and earned. We may solely get to see one angle of 1 afternoon of those fictional characters’ lives, nevertheless it’s nonetheless true and sophisticated, a second in time that I acknowledge and really feel, deep in my intestine. It’s a reminiscence that doesn’t belong to me, however one which feels proper and true all the identical.