PRINTThe Artists' Retreat
Big-time filmmakers flock to the intimacy of True/False
Trujillo Paumier
Director Marshall Curry works on the set of his newest documentary Racing Dreams, a film he describes as a coming-of-age story. Speeding into Columbia, directors reflect on how this festival measures up against the rest and provides a home for documentary filmmakers.
February 25, 2010 | 12:00 a.m. CST
The winter air in Columbia is not charged with the taste of salt water off the Mediterranean, and George Clooney will not be spotted sauntering along the sandy shores of Stephens Lake. Despite this — for a few days, at least — Columbia becomes a cultural island awash in a vast sea of Missourah. Such is the effect of the True/False Film Festival.
For one weekend, the middle of the Midwest becomes the center of the documentary world as filmmakers unite for what Brooklyn-based director Marshall Curry calls, the most inconvenient festival. Curry loves attending but notes that it takes him longer to get to Columbia than it does to the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam. Curry was last at True/False in 2006 with his Oscar-nominated documentary Street Fight, and he’s returning this year with Racing Dreams.
Not to be outdone, British director Simon Chambers describes the Midwest as “a mythical landscape” and goes on to joke, “We know New York, we know L.A., and then there’s this sort of in-between bit.” Teasing aside, Chambers is excited to come to Columbia for the first time to screen his new film, Cowboys in India, which chronicles the recolonization of India by corporations.
Despite the hassles inherent in traveling to Columbia, this enthusiasm is shared by many of the filmmakers who come. Last here in 2005, director Stephen Marshall says community involvement brings him back. He won the True Vision Award, True/False’s sole award, for his films This Revolution and BattleGround: 21 Days on Empire’s Edge.
Although Park City, Utah, is similarly transformed during the Sundance Film Festival, Marshall comments that the city is also a tourist destination. “(Columbia) is actually a place where the residents are there,” he says. “They’re there full-time, and it’s not a transient place. It’s not about buying sweaters on the main strip; it’s about becoming a part of the community for three or four days.” This year, Marshall will make the trek from Los Angeles to show his film HolyWars, which is about a St. Louis-area missionary who travels to convert Muslims to Christianity.
True/False has gained a much more impressive reputation among documentary filmmakers and on the festival circuit than many might expect. Chambers says: “All the filmmakers I’ve talked to say: ‘Oh God, you’ve got to go to True/False. It’s great; it’s the best festival for the documentary filmmaker to go to. You get very lively audiences who take part in discussion afterward.’”
Curry calls it a surprising festival because, as he says, “there are not a lot of smallish, regional festivals that are hours from an airport in Missouri that can attract so many different filmmakers. It’s one of the top two or three festivals for most filmmakers.”
Clearly, the reason for True/False’s reputation is twofold; the filmmakers love to interact with their audiences, and just as much, they enjoy interacting with one another. “If you go somewhere like, I don’t know, Sundance, you’re going to be part of a kind of circus,” Chambers explains. The other filmmakers echoed his comments.
Lucy Walker, director of Waste Land, describes True/False as a world-class, professional seminar with the world’s best documentary films and filmmakers all together in one place. Although this is not an issue for fiction filmmakers in Hollywood, Walker explains that such a concentrated gathering of directors is rare in the documentary world. “There’s only ever one documentary film director in any one scene at a time,” Walker says. “I’m certainly the only documentary director in the garbage dump or up (Mt.) Everest or visiting (Mikhail) Gorbachev or whatever it is I’ve been doing lately.” Drawing on his previous festival experience, Marshall says, “You can go to Sundance, you can go to HotDocs, you can go to Cannes, you can go to Tribeca and these other festivals, but you’re never going to be in that kind of concentrated environment with the filmmakers.”
The factor that makes the film festival unique, according to Marshall, is that it provides a rare opportunity to accurately evaluate your work against the best of the documentary genre.
True/False’s atmosphere might be its most defining characteristic and also provides the charm that lures filmmakers to mid-Missouri. “When you’re at a festival that’s entirely documentary people, my sense is that the parties are just more interesting and more fun and maybe a little less glamorous, but to me a lot more interesting,” Curry says.
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