This year’s True/False Film Fest will debut several documentaries and welcome new artists from around the world. With over 40 films on the lineup, it also marks the return of filmmakers who have shown their work previously. The diverse lineup features a mixture of innovative and experimental approaches to documentary filmmaking. As the lines between fiction and nonfiction blur, attendees will be encouraged to rethink reality.
_Bisbee ‘17_
Robert Greene (_Kate Plays Christine_) appears at the festival for the fifth time with his historical documentary about an Arizona town built around tragedy. The film uses current residents to reenact an event known as the Bisbee Deportation, where Eastern European and Mexican immigrant miners were abandoned by their community in 1917. It is a haunting mosaic depiction of a 100-year-old ethnic cleanse that resonates a century later with immigration disputes in America.
_Shakedown_
Leilah Weinraub chronicles the ups and downs of a black lesbian strip club in Los Angeles by documenting explicit performances from 2002-2015. As a former member of the Shakedown Angels, the director spotlights a counterculture of hip-hop and strobe lights that became a vital space for queer women of color. This is an unmissable LGBT celebration fresh off its run at the Berlin International Film Festival earlier this month.
_Won’t You Be My Neighbor?_
Oscar-winning director Morgan Neville (_20 Feet From Stardom_) returns to Columbia with his portrait of Mister Rogers, an American cultural touchstone whose idealism and civility have been missing from television sets since his death in 2003. The film will be a deeply personal account of the man whose career was spent digesting thorny issues for a kid’s program.
_Matangi/Maya/M.I.A._
Popstar Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam, or M.I.A., gets a stripped-down profile of her career and upbringing by her best friend from art school, director Steven Loveridge. It will feature video diaries made by Maya herself over 6 years that detail her musical beginnings as well as her family’s connection to a militant rebel group.
_The Rider_
Chloé Zhao’s last feature was a story about Native-American siblings living on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Her latest docudrama studies an injured rodeo cowboy whom she met there and has earned raves at Cannes, Telluride, Toronto and Sundance. Brady Jandreau and a cast of non-actors play versions of themselves in this American comeback story that truly walks the line between fiction and nonfiction.
_American Animals_
Bart Layton portrays an ambitious art heist by two Kentucky suburbans (rising stars Barry Keoghan and Evan Peters) who steal rare books from the Transylvania University library in a thriller that underscores a moral dilemma of privilege and entitlement like Sofia Coppola’s _The Bling Ring_. The film had strong reactions at Sundance where its U.S. distribution rights were purchased in a historic deal by The Orchard and an exhibitionist ticket service, MoviePass.
_Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist_
Lorna Tucker directs her love letter to British fashion designer turned environmental activist, Vivienne Westwood. The film explores how a legend of the catwalk changed youth culture and built her anti-capitalist message. Along the way, Tucker chips away at her subject’s ruminating expansion plans and enters a deeper reservoir of passion behind the woman who was appointed a dame by Queen Elizabeth II in 2006.
_Shirkers_
In the summer of 1992, Singaporean youngster Sandi Tan and her friends worked with a middle-aged man named Georges to create the perfect indie riff on _Heathers_. Only Georges stole the film, which sent Tan (now an L.A. novelist) on a new journey while working with the same project. Shirkers is a movie within a movie that flows like a record of past and present attempts to break down the distinction between the story of life and life itself.
_Flight of a Bullet_
Beata Bubenec films a one-take documentary about being a female camera operator in the dangerous Donbass region of Ukraine. Her footage becomes an exhilarating depiction of war’s trivial annihilation as well as the harrowing reality that comes along with it.
_Of Fathers and Sons_
Talal Derki, posing as an Al Qaeda-affiliated filmmaker, has made a shocking new movie that traces the life of Abu Osama and his son. He is a sensitive boy who is being trained alongside his seven brothers to fight as a jihadi. Over the course of two years, the film takes a closer look into the family as well as civil war tribulations and radical Islam.
_Three Identical Strangers_
In a stranger-than-fiction story that makes great implications on nature versus nurture, Robert, Edward and David reunite after being separated at birth and growing up in circumstances that were drastically unalike. Director Tim Wardle keeps things light for the most part in his retelling of a bizarre phenomenon that turned a set of triplets into media stars in 1980.
_Playing Men_
Matjaž Ivanišin uses a mix of several documentary forms to deconstruct the meaning of the word “play” in terms of masculinity when it comes to anything from sports to musicals. The film will be a personal and social study set in both local and global cultural contexts.
_Our New President_
Maxim Pozdorovkin compiles Russian media and political programming in an effort to expose the fake news empire that became the wind beneath Donald Trump’s wings during the 2016 election. It tracks his rise to presidency while serving as a perilous documentation of modern propaganda.
Six films will make their world premieres at the 2018 True/False Film Fest. Erick Stoll and Chase Whiteside tell a Mexican three musketeer story about entertaining performers who care for their grandmother in _América_. Khalik Allah returns with _Black Mother_, a compassionate look at ancestral influences from his mother’s home country, Jamaica. _The Task_ takes an honest look at its subjects through a group discussion between strangers about prejudices, stereotypes and backstories. In _Voices of the Sea_, director Kim Hopkins sheds light on the push-pull relationship between a loyal Cuban fisherman and his wife who dreams of a life in America just 90 miles north of shore. _Combat Obscura_ is Miles Lagoze’s war movie made up of actual footage collected during his time in Afghanistan. Finally, _Lovers of the Night_ retraces the philosophical lives of Irish monks and will play alongside a short called _Baby Brother_.
_Edited by Claire Colby | ccolby@themaneater.com_