The True/False Podcast

It's been a long break, but the True/False Podcast is coming back, and soon! Before the new season starts in earnest on March 17, though, we wanted to preview True/False's online film retrospective called Hindsight. The series runs over eight weeks leading up to this year's festival, and it features films from True/False's past. Virtual attendees can buy passes and tickets to the series on the True/False website to gain access to the films, as well as discussion questions and prompts to accompany them. Ted Rogers, the programmer at Ragtag Cinema, selected the films, and sat down with the podcast to explain what festival-goers can look forward to.

Hi all — as you're probably aware, we are in the midst of a global pandemic. What that means for us at KBIA is all our time is taken up covering what that looks like on the ground here. In light of that, this week's episode is being postponed. We'll be back next week with filmmaker and journalist David France, director of "Welcome to Chechnya," and Maxim Lapunov, one of the subjects of that film. Thank you for your patience, and stay safe: wash your hands, self-isolate as much as possible, and we'll see you next week.

In this week’s episode, True/False Programmer Jeanelle Augustin talks with filmmaker Lance Oppenheim about his latest documentary, “Some Kind of Heaven." In the film, Oppenheim tells the story of residents at The Villages, in Florida - the country’s largest retirement community. The Villages — singular — is home to more than 100,000 retirees, and boasts 12 golf courses, three libraries, and no residents under 55. The rows of houses and town squares are designed to evoke an American yesteryear that can be disconcerting and disorienting, making it rich material for a Oppenheim, a filmmaker habitually drawn to weird places.

Climate change is an issue so broad and pervasive it is easy to abstract. It looms large over so many aspects of life it can feel less like a subject to explore, and more like a mood or a feeling, a doom permeating aspects of every story told in the 20th century. But instead of approaching it from a distance, or preparing a sanitized lecture, in her newest film The Hottest August, filmmaker and True/False alum Brett Story looks for the climate crisis’s many intersections, with labor, with capitalism, and the human psyche. Story is a geographer, and both Hottest August and her previous feature The Prison in Twelve Landscapes explore their subject matter through place, and people’s relationships with the places they inhabit.

A film can never exactly capture how we experience a moment, or time passing, but it can evoke those sensations through its structure or editing or cinematography. In this week’s episode, we talk with a filmmaker whose films reflect that conflict — True/False alum Sophy Romvari. She’s a Toronto-based filmmaker who has primarily worked in the world of non-fiction shorts, including “Pumpkin Movie,” which screened at True/False 2018.

On this week's episode, we're previewing some of the films coming to True/False this year, with festival programmers Jeanelle Augustin, Chris Boeckmann and Amir George. The line-up includes a whopping 38 feature films, 26 shorts and multiple repertory programs. Jeanelle, Chris and Amir talk us through some of this year's world premieres, potential crowd-pleasers and can't miss screenings.

Having your work rejected is part and parcel of being a filmmaker, be it when submitting to festivals, applying for funding, trying to sell a film or get distribution. But it can be hard to separate self worth from work, or to reconcile the reality of the industry with personal beliefs and values. These are all issues filmmaker and artist Zia Anger touches on in her multi-media performance "My First Film." Anger sat down with us to talk about how the show, which traces the production of a "failed" feature film she directed, has helped her to reflect on her work, and has provided a different kind of catharsis.

In the world of nonfiction filmmaking, the idea of "engagement" is often raised as a key part of the process. How does a film engage the audience, or with its subjects, what conversations does it start, or augment? For Robert Greene, whose film "Bisbee '17" screened at the 2018 True/False Film Festival, engagement offers an opportunity to counter the exploitative aspect of documentary filmmaking. And in the case of "Bisbee '17" it meant going back to the eponymous town year after year to continue the conversation.

The next season of the True/False Podcast doesn't start up for a few more months still, but we thought it was a good time to re-feature an episode from last season. The Edge of Democracy, which screened at this year's festival, is now streaming on Netflix, so we're bringing back our episode with the film's director, Petra Costa.

Bumpers are the short films that play before screenings at festivals. True/False has different bumpers for each day of the festival, each related to that year's theme. For this episode of the True/False Podcast, Allison Coffelt sat down with Chelsea Myers, of Tiny Attic Productions, which produced the bumpers for this year's festival.