The True/False Podcast

In this archived edition of the True False podcast, we revisit a conversation with film-maker Deborah Stratman about the power of voice in her film "The Illinois Parables."

Sometimes, documentary shorts can be seen as stepping stones for filmmakers who want to direct feature-length films, or as afterthoughts on a festival program. But, given their lower costs and shorter runtimes, shorts can allow for a wealth of experimentation, with narrative and format, that features couldn't sustain. On this episode of the True/False Podcast, filmmaker Charlie Lyne sits down to discuss the differences between the two forms, and the unique and varied offerings short-form filmmaking has to offer.

Figuring out how to tell large-scale stories that affect millions of people can be a daunting task for any filmmaker. Sometimes, personal experience is the most effective way in. In this conversation, taken from the Field Session "Politics Ditto," from this year's festival, directors Nanfu Wang (One Child Nation) and Petra Costa (The Edge of Democracy) talk about how they interwove the personal and the political in their films.

Anand Patwardhan is a filmmaker who has been making documentaries on the socio-political reality of India for over four decades. His latest film, a four-hour and twenty-minute epic titled "Reason," chronicles India's shift from secular democracy toward Hindu fundamentalism and was shown at this year's True/False Film Fest. Although audiences in Columbia were able to see the film, Patwardhan has been fighting to show it in India, where he has been stymied by government censorship. Patwardhan sat

Emelie Mahdavian is the writer, editor and producer of this year's True Life Fund recipient "Midnight Traveler," showing at True False 2019. The film is directed by film-maker Hassan Fazili, who documented his own family's journey from Afghanistan as they fled the Taliban. Fazili shot the entire film on three cell phones. In this conversation, host Allison Coffelt talks with Mahdavian about the film's revelations on the asylum process, the nature of family and the elusiveness of happy endings.

In his first feature film, “No data plan,” True/False alum Miko Revereza eschews a faceless off-screen narrator in favor of a voiceless, subtitled one, along with interviews of friends and family. “No data plan” reinvents the road trip movie as a film where the bulk of the action happens off-screen.

In this episode, we’ll be listening to a conversation between True/False’s Paul Sturtz and Dora Garcia, director of the film “ Segunda Vez ." The staged documentary is anchored in the “happenings” - which are part performance art pieces, part social experiments - of Argentinian theorist and psychoanalyst Oscar Masotta. He was influential in morphing the artistic landscape of Buenos Aires in the 1960s, and brought the theories of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to the Spanish-speaking world.

On this episode, we’re previewing this year’s films and filmmakers with three True/False programmers, Chris Boeckmann, Amir George and Abby Sun. This year’s True/False film line-up includes 36 new nonfiction films, 5 repertory films, and 18 new shorts. With so many films, we’ve asked Chris, Amir and Abby to talk us through some titles.

WIth upbeat and affirmational songs like “It’s Such a Good Feeling,” and “It’s You I Like,” music was at the heart of Mister Rogers’ message, and how he expressed his worldview. It’s fitting, then, that music plays a key part in Academy Award Winner Morgan Neville’s Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, which screened at True/False 2018. The film explores Rogers’ life and work, but it’s more than a biopic: the film privileges Fred Rogers’ ideas over his personal history, and asks its viewers to consider

Directors Agnieszka Zwiefka and Daniel Hymanson attended the 2018 Rough Cut Retreat; where they got feedback on early versions of their films. We checked in with them about 6 months later to get an intimate view of the filmmaking process in real time. In this episode, we’ll be talking about the responsibility a filmmaker has to their audience, and to their subjects.