True/False Films: Killing Time & Big Men

The best documentary films often take a serious, prevalent issue and are able to explore it from an angle that has been silent. In the case of Killing Time, Dutch filmmaker Jaap van Hoewijk visits a Texas town where he follows the family of a convicted rapist & murderer days before the criminal is set to be executed. Whereas Big Men looks at the multiplicity of humans behind the oil market, mainly through the eyes of a small Texan company on the verge of tapping into a huge oil field and the African countries these types of operations devastate. Both films are very different but both give a new voice & perspective to very old, very controversial, and very sweeping issues.

The director of Big Men, Rachel Boynton, introduced her film at True/False by saying she began making it about nine years ago "with a plane ticket to Africa and a few phone numbers in her pocket," the result a startling slice of greed that slowly unfolds around a series of candid interviews and immersive scene setting. In Africa she brings us on the boats of Nigerian rebels brandishing guns as they break & set aflame pipelines, pirate ships that siphon oil from others expensive drilling operations, entrepreneurs & governments who try to work with American companies but who become lost in the potential for greed or the in attempts to protect their fragile countries. In America, Boynton brings us to the offices of drawling, small time oil men trying to navigate their potentially huge investment against larger companies, tempestuous African governments, and a general confusion brought about by their sudden status change. Even though it is easy to portray the perpetrators of oil drilling as evil, Boynton's film had an unexpected sadness, capturing the grief & emotional response to thoughtless acts on both the American & the African sides. The film leaves you with the feeling that no one actually wins in the oil industry, even those profiting are often deflated to the point of being inhuman, and not in a demonic way but in a pitiful one. By physically embedding itself into the dueling sides of the oil industry- those who want the natural resources and those who have them- Big Men was able to show a story of people providing a face to an inexplicable, enigmatic industry usually only profiled in terms of money, barrels, and a fluctuating stock market.

Killing Time followed in the same vein as Big Men, taking a personal lens to a huge, socio-political issue. So often documentary filmmakers give us the story of the prisoner to illustrate the issue of the death penalty (Into The Abyss, Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, The Thin Blue Line), using a speaking, thinking person- guilty or not- to evoke an emotional and instinctual response from the audience: killing a human, this human or any other human, is wrong. Yet Killing Time took an alternative approach, profiling the days leading up to an execution from the perspective of the people balanced on the fulcrum of the event; the ranging emotions of the prisoner's family, the religious house that acts as a sanctuary for relatives prior to the killing, the lively, make-up wearing media troupe acting for the cameras, even one of the victims and her unexpected response to witnessing the final minutes of her attacker.

When I asked the director what it was that he took away from this film, what was an unexpected something that will stay with him forever he spoke of a very distinct image that will now, like his film, haunt me every time I think of the death penalty. Jaap van Hoewijk said that when he arrived outside the prison to film on the day of the execution there was a large ball of crumpled, weatherworn yellow caution tape being unfurled by policemen to hem in the mix of protestors (those for and against what was about to take place) and media. It wasn't the bright, yellow, American tape that struck him, or even the blaring words of caution, it was the fact that this same large clump of tape wadded up on the dry Texan lawn of this prison was unrolled and rolled, again and again and again. This mass of tape was reused each time an execution was to take place, the death penalty a matter of simple routine,  the tape a small symbol of the complete and utter disregard surrounding the taking of a life, the taking of a life that was anything but routine for the survivors of the prisoner's family.


The death penalty and oil industry are two issues that I repeatedly feel a personal shock and embarrassment about as an American, two issues that continue to unnecessarily, and often indirectly, take lives. Killing Time and Big Men did not exactly dive right into the vast complexity of these issues, they focused on the stories of people swimming within them. These films created humanizing portraits of controversial social, political, economic, even religious points of contention in hopes of making these daunting subjects seem less so. It seems easier to take action in the name of a face, a family, a child, a life and I hope these films inspire audiences to do so.

True/False Expanded: Jodie Mack & Dusty Stacks of Mom

What do you do when your family business is about to go under? Obviously you make a stop motion animation rock opera about it. At least if you are the animator/artist Jodie Mack. Mack's mother owned a thriving poster store business for decades, selling the pictures of musicians (from Bob Marley to Britney Spears), artists (Dali to the guy who made that photo of Pink Floyd album covers painted on the backs of naked ladies which was super popular in dorm rooms across New Jersey in my college years), and movie stars (Clooney! Clooney! Clooney!) in a pre-internet age when images weren't immediately accessible by the click of a button and digital printing/print on demand was yet to sweep the industry. Being that Mack's animations are usually made with recycled or redundant materials, a very conscious choice on behalf of the artist, it only made sense that she traveled to her childhood home to use the hundreds (thousands?) of posters who were about to meet their end, bringing them to life once more before their untimely deaths.

Mack set up scenes of posters dancing at their own will, moving collages of bright objects & faces cut out from the posters, her mom's dedicated hand written & high lighted notebooks of inventory, even her mom makes a few jittery stop-motion appearances- all crafted together in an ultimate music video that Mack sang along to live, her music re-workings of songs from Dark Side of the Moon, her lyrics telling the sweet, sad story of market trend, family, and tradition. Mack said she decided to sing along to the film live in order to save time in post-production but her live presence added a rock concert element that really made the film pop. The front woman singing in the shadows her personal lyrics added a layer to the concert nostalgia that these posters hailed from, Mack's witty, talented, bubbly, intelligent presence allowed the audience an even closer connection to the Dusty Stacks of Mom, and even to the normally passive interaction with film & technology- a very strong theme of the film. It is not a business or statistic that suffers from a market change or scientific progress, it is a person, an artform, a culture, the environment that becomes seemingly superfluous or forgotten in the name of "advancement."

When Mack introduced her film she said that she hates the term "trippy," preferring the idea of a "post-psychedelic climate" instead, the style of the LSD days being re-appropriated now as a response to the onslaught of new media with all of its bright flashing pixels of promise. But I do find it intriguing that a lot of her fellow art/film/post-psychedelic-climate artists all seem to choose trippy imagery & live performance (Erica Magrey, Martha Colburn). These artists seem to convey the concept of the new media circus by adding a layer of nostalgic imagery (possibly associated with their parents generation), mixed media (both classic & new), and their live presence to create a physical, tangible version of the digital rabbit holes we all have fallen down. Change might bring about the closing of mom & pop operations but it also brings about the creation of something new and Dusty Stacks of Mom is most definitely a beautiful new hybrid of sound, image, and heart that I hope everyone gets a chance to see.

True/False Film: Boyhood

Riding on a shuttle to the airport with the star of Richard Linklater's Boyhood, a narrative film about the maturation & environment of a young boy that was shot over twelve years to capture the actual growth of the actor & provide a strange plane of reality to the fiction, really reinforced True/False's decision to choose this scripted film as the closing piece of their documentary film festival. Seeing the real boy, Eller Coltrane, behind the character, Mason Jr., gave me a brief, panicked flash of Truman Syndrome: was I being watched since this boy is? But, hm, he's not being filmed, right? That was a movie. One that I am not actually part of at all. The story of his character ended and was encapsulated there on screen...but, wait, his life didn't really end since this boy will continue to grow and his trajectory is going to keep hurtling forth into space & time. We are just no longer able to peek in on his life, or this hybrid life of on & off screen, a fine line reinforced by Eller who, in the post film Q&A, talked of how Linklater imbued the script with pieces of his actual life, Eller's costumes oftentimes his own wardrobe. With Boyhood Linklater managed to do something no one has in a long, long time: bring the medium of film even closer to the reality it has always pretended to be. And I say all this without even being a huge Linklater fan.

Linklater's writing sometimes feels like a wooden plank to me, and it is often mimicked in student films minus any of the nuance that comes with age. But with this film his stilted Brechtian dialogue was flooded with such a touching concept that it humanized even the most flat of his signature monologue-like dialogues. Seeing the development of a Linklater character across this span of time, growing into the voice that the director uses, also added to the believability of the character/director voice, seeing the sweet pot-smoking philosopher tone as it naturally develops in a life, real or fake. Boyhood found a way to reveal the director, or maybe the universe the director has created, in a way that makes all his other work make sense to me now. Whether autobiographical or not I saw the development of the thinking white boy protagonist typical of Linklater (and a lot of his contemporaries) and understood the places from which this tradition comes from. I harp on the overabundance of sad sack cerebral white guy characters in indie film (and I still don't think we need so many of them!!!) but Boyhood let me see the places from which this thematic choice comes from- that of male pride, sensitivity, competition, fear- and acted as a story about the development of the male indie director culture as much as it did about this character as he moves about his daily life of homework, divorces, and haircuts.

With this film you are looking in on the feeling of real life over twelve consecutive years; real houses reflecting the real styles of the times, a startling thing to see in quick succession (well, not so quick since the movie is 2 hours and 45minutes long), making transparent our ever evolving versions of reality. The change in music, the change in cars, the change in electronic devices, clothes, bookbags, are all laid out chronologically, plain and simple in a way that makes you able to notice the miniscule changes that we immediately take for granted on a daily basis and the way we so quickly disregard the immediate past. Boyhood allows you to pause not only on the life of the main character but on the lives of us all, letting us bear stark witness to seemingly fleeting detail, choice, and human interaction that we are confronted with each minute into hour, year into decade. All of these details and choices are what make a life, and a world, both in a film and outside of a film, and this is why Boyhood is most definitely a work of nonfiction.  

True/False: I am BUSY!

I've been so busy here at True/False cramming in every last film that I can! Forgoing things like food, sleep, even parties in order to see the brilliance of new documentary films and to talk with friends I haven't seen in years! I promise to write recaps of all of the amazing experiences at the end of this lovely event! So, stay tuned! [Correction: I was so tired/busy I spelled the film fest NAME wrong in the original post....]

True/False Film: Concerning Violence

I don't know what was going on in Swedish TV in the 60s/70s but it sure was something! Actually, the Producer of the film Concerning Violence, Tobias Janson, shed some light on the state of Swedish tv from that era and his previous collaboration with the director Goran Hugo Olssan, The Black Power Mix Tape, both of which were created using footage from the Swedish TV archives. Apparently Sweden urged its people to go out into the world, to bring their culture to other cultures and, more importantly, to return with documentation of what they found. Janson also said that this cultural exchange happened to coincide with much of the Vietnam conflict so the amount of politically charged work was often dense, the nature of struggle and identity a pronounced theme.  In the case of Concerning Violence the images were a harsh illustration of the strong words of the political theorist Frantz Fanon and his meditations on the driving force of colonization and the inevitable result of decolonization: violence.

Fanon's words would boldly & thoughtfully materialize on the screen, text from The Wretched of the Earth, contemplating the fierce realities of decolonization. If brute force was the only thing allowing the colonists to maintain a position of power, the only means of communication between the colonizers and the colonized, the only way to reverse the system was to react with a greater display of violence. The filmmakers saw Fanon's words as fact but interpreted them through the truth of these facts allowing grainy, textured film images such as the decimation of villages resulting in young, amputated mother nursing her equally deformed baby, the blindness of the stark cocktail sipping colonizers and the entire culture they try to destroy that brings them these drinks, the complete confusion that both sides seemed to suffer from since rationalization and communication was impossible. And, even though we tend to think of colonization in the past tense it is a term that unfortunately can be applied to a lot of modern mechanisms in place today.

The truth that a cultural, national, and often racial, bias currently exists in power structures is something that that no one wants to discuss because of the only logical conclusion that can change these situations, that of violence. Concerning Violence didn't feel to me to be a film in the normal sense, it was more of a warning. A warning brought to us from history & precedence that the filmmakers expertly crafted, looking for a balance of truth and caution in a situation that seems unfathomable in retrospect but is actually quite prominent even today. The materials used to construct this film might be from the past but they speak to a world we still live in whether we want to admit it or not.

True/False: Day One

I am in Columbia MO ya'll! YAY! Last night on my way back to my hotel here I was talking to an amazing volunteer for the fest, in fact every time I engage with a fest volunteer it turns out that, when they are not driving people around to venues or taking tickets or trying to squeeze one more film into their schedule, they are leading wonderful, often vital, lives engaged in something they are (almost!) as passionate about as they are about True/False! Jackie & I got into a conversation about how people who have never been to T/F don't get it. And, like any good cult, it is true.

There really is a spark in every part of this festival that is indescribable and intangible, an ether-like mix of beautiful art, sweet souls, and a general feeling of home in some way as the streets are filled with all kinds of people discussing expertly curated documentary film, leaving the standard film fest attitude problem to be hugged out immediately upon arrival! You all know I drank the T/F Kool Aid (or maybe it's the Schlafly?) awhile ago but upon my return I can safely say: DRINK THE KOOL AID!  Ok, more to come after I continue my cult like rituals on Day Two!



O, and by the way, this years theme is : Magic Realism! That sweet spot of what is actually happening behind the magic trick, the realness existing somewhere before it gets trapped on film and portrayed as a version of truth before our eyes in the glow of the whirring projector.  (Also there is more caffeine in my blood than blood right now so I apologize for whatever this post sounds like.)

T/F Film: 20,000 Days On Earth

As far as rock music documentaries go Maysles Gimme Shelter and Pennebaker's Don't Look Back are awesome...but 20,000 Days on Earth? It might be better. As a music doc it captures the person (the Australian singer, writer, musician, performer Nick Cave) inside the persona, a fluid portrait instead of purely a rockstar pose. As a film it is inventive in storytelling creating scenes that convey a feeling & style just as much as they convey information or understanding. As art it has touches of sweet, yet grotesque, absurdity and personal warmth that almost remind me of George Kuchar, a visual quality sometimes reminiscent of Nam June Paik, a thoughtful staging that moves like finely choreographed theater. Then there is the voiceover writing, mostly culled by the directors from Cave's notebooks and crafted by Cave directly, writing that continues to amaze, baffle, provoke, lash out, laugh, cry and love.  Cave's writing, in song and otherwise, is a mix of universal myth that softly bites with sharp teeth into reality like Wallace Stevens, toys at the edges of the absurd, is buttoned up like a porcelain Victorian novel yet lustful as a dimestore romance paperback. Cave's writing has always been the hook that has lured me long before I understood his music.

In the post film Q&A the directors, who hail mostly from an art background, spoke of how they rely on feeling when they are creating and this film definitely accomplished that as emotion and mood washed over the entire audience like the rainy Brighton shores Nick Cave resides along, like the microcosms he creates with each album, causing anyone- fan or not- to float into this alternate universe of the film & of Cave. Really beautiful art can provoke, and the best art can provoke in the name of hope and wonder. This film is a meditation on creation and destruction, inspiring, encouraging and warning about the power of ideas in the biggest and smallest of ways. 20,000 Days On Earth isn't about Nick Cave, like any good story the character here is just a fragile shell holding together something warm, alive, truthful. This film, like Nick Cave, is of another world, a scary gorgeous one that couldn't be better to get lost in for awhile so as to remember the reasons to want, need, and desire to return to the real one.