REVIEW: True/False Film Fest’s ‘Shorts: Spring’ showcases stories of love and resilience

True/False Film Fest’s first collection of short films, titled “Shorts: Spring” explores metaphorical growth, change and resilience. From a young documentarian deciding on treatment for thyroid cancer to three transgender opera singers defining themselves in a rigidly traditional space, the shorts showcase human strength in the face of adversity.

In “Expression of Illness,” the director Bryn Silverman must decide whether she will undergo radioactive iodine treatment for her thyroid cancer. The process is deeply personal, and most shots are recorded by her partner Naveen Chaubal. 

Silverman explained that the project had set out initially to document others affected by the disease. Viewers see Silverman connect with other individuals also affected by cancer at the American Thyroid Association conference. However, after a suggestion at the conference, the filmmakers began reviewing footage they had taken of Silverman’s personal experience, turning their film into more of an intimate portrayal story.

Silverman makes a point to show her journey through this dark time, which manifests as much in physical forms as in emotional ones. Chaubal’s camera rarely stays still, and that movement adds to the uncertainty and confusion of Silverman’s experience receiving health care.

Directors Aurora Brachman and LaTajh Weaver gave the couple featured in “Hold Me Close,” Corinne and Tiana, an opportunity to control their story. Brachman and Weaver taught them how to use the recording equipment and had them document their organic conversations for a month. The resulting documentary is astonishing in its intimacy and vulnerability. 

For most of the film, the audio recorded by the couple plays over footage of the couple’s existing day-to-day experiences. The shots rarely move and are framed within doorways and the natural shapes of their house, allowing for the world to feel still, as if the whole universe lives only inside this house.

As the couple revels in the honeymoon phase of their relationship, they appear to experience love in a way they haven’t in the past. Though they feel the pressure of society to conform, they feel free to be themselves with each other. As one of them says, “I feel like our love has its own galaxy.” For the runtime of the documentary, viewers are able to live in that galaxy with them.

“Sunset and the Mockingbird” follows Gloria Clayborne as she navigates life with her husband, famous jazz pianist Junior Mance, as his symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease worsen. The film shines in its artful restraint. Where it would be easy to focus on Mance’s legacy, dramatizing a celebrity musician losing his ability to play music, the film instead focuses on the devotion and love between the couple, specifically Clayborne as she navigates life with Mance during a progressively difficult time. 

Mance’s stardom never lingered in the film. Instead, his relationship with music is presented as something deeply personal. The loss of his ability to play not as a tragedy for society, but as an intimate experience for him and those closest to him. Clayborne ensures Mance knows he is loved, even when he resists the idea. Clayborne explains how she sees her role in their relationship during the film in terms of one of her favorite songs Mance recorded, which is a rendition of Duke Ellington’s “Sunset and the Mockingbird.” “I am the mockingbird preserving his legacy and he is the sunset,” Clayborne said.

After the showing, director Jyllian Gunther talked about the decade-long process of making the film, embedding herself in Mance and Clayborne’s lives to record hundreds of moments that they experienced. Gunther presents the viewer with the deeply moving devotion and resilience of a caregiver, living through the devastation of a loved one being affected by Alzheimer’s disease. 

Another documentary in the “Shorts: Spring” collection, “Tessitura,” focuses on how three resilient transgender opera singers are changing the opera community. For centuries, an opera performer’s voice dictated what roles they were able to perform. Unfortunately, that practice is still prevalent among casting. Therefore, a singer’s tessitura, or comfortable vocal range, may cause a vocalist to be repetitively cast in a particular role.

Directors Lydia Cornett and Brit Fryer explore how transgender opera performers both exist within and are changing the genre norms, following singers Katherine Goforth, Lucas Bouk and Breanna Sinclairé. Naomi André, whose research focuses on voice, gender and race in opera, informs viewers on the history of opera gender norms.

According to André, though it seems like gender can be fluid in opera, norms and biases are persistent in the community. Bouk mentions that transposing, or changing the key or octave of, parts for cisgender performers is not uncommon, but rhetorically muses that it is rarely if ever done for transgender singers. The film ends with Goforth performing a classic opera piece transposed down an octave, in part to prove that it can be done successfully.

The documentary focuses on gender history in opera, shows opera performances done by the three singers, and at one point, records the inside of Sinclairé’s throat as she sings during a nasoendoscopy. The film’s approach highlights the achievement and struggles that transgender opera singers often face in an art form that has long and can still be steeped in traditional gender roles.

All of these films showcase beauty in some way. That is not to say that the films are categorically happy, “Sunset and the Mockingbird” and “Expression of Illness” specifically focus on matters of great personal tribulation. Moreover, the films demonstrate that beauty comes from resilience and love, whether that be from opera singers being able to be themselves, a queer couple in love despite societal pressure or a woman and her partner navigating her cancer diagnosis.

“Shorts: Spring” will be showing again at 9:30 a.m. on Saturday, March 1as a part of True/False Film Fest at The Globe in downtown Columbia. 

You can keep up with The Maneater’s 2025 True/False Film Fest coverage here.

Edited by Molly Levine | mlevine@themaneater.com

Copy edited by Natalie Kientzy | nkientzy@themaneater.com

Edited by Emilia Hansen | ehansen@themaneater.com 

Edited by Emily Skidmore | eskidmore@themaneater.com