Columbia’s True/False Film Festival keeps growing, but remains as special as ever

Photo Courtesy of True/False Film Festival

One of the most frequent comments you hear about Columbia’s True/False Film Festival is that it’s different from any other. It’s the kind of statement that would be easy to brush off if you weren’t hearing it from so many different groups of people: repeat attendees, new converts, veterans of bigger festivals like Sundance, Toronto, or SXSW, and, perhaps most notably, filmmakers.

“It really feels like it has all the perfect components for a film festival, which I didn’t realize until I went to more of them and saw how badly they could work,” Charlie Shackleton, director of the true-crime essay film Zodiac Killer Project, says. “It’s got the perfect size footprint, with venues that are close to each other. It’s easy to find people because you know the key spots, and it shows exactly the kinds of movies I’m excited to see.”

Shackleton speaks from experience. In the decade prior to coming to Columbia with his first feature—a highlight of Sundance and this year’s True/False—he attended the documentary-centric film festival with short films. He’s been coming since 2015, bringing along a project almost every year.

“The scale of the audience is impossible for me to comprehend,” Shackleton says. “You could never fill a 1,200-seat venue in London, where I live, for films like these despite having a population 50 times the size of Columbia.”

True/False has been showing nonfiction films, and films that play with nonfiction formats, for over 20 years now, and amazingly, it’s remained an accessible, easily walkable festival for all that time, even as its audience has steadily grown. 

“You have to remember who the fest is for,” True/False Co-Founder David Wilson says. “We always thought of communities, plural, and making sure we were serving all of them.”

Making sure the festival serves all its intended audiences is no mean feat—There are a lot of them, and they’re each given equal importance. There’s the filmmakers and the press covering their films. Then there’s the city of Columbia itself, which includes a mix of townies, college kids, and Mizzou faculty and staff. Finally, there’s the growing number of out-of-towners who come simply to enjoy the films. There needs to be space for all of these groups to mingle, see exactly as many films as they want to see, and not feel shut out or overwhelmed.

Wilson praised the efforts of this year’s programming team as an example of how the festival has maintained a balance of enthusiastic audiences and easy access to the films themselves.

“The team this year made a really smart choice, which is that they didn’t use Jesse Hall (one of Mizzou’s auditoriums, historically the festival’s biggest venue), which is massive,” Wilson says. “They wanted the festival to feel full, feel that sense of community, and we all know as we’re trying to get people back to theaters, seeing a movie in a full theater is even better than in a partially full theater. It was a really smart use of capacity.” Films this year screened at other regular True/False venues including the Missouri Theatre, Ragtag Cinema, The Blue Note, and Rhynsburger Theatre.

Photo Courtesy of True/False Film Festival

That level of care has, over the years, created a dedicated community of artists, industry folks, enthusiasts, and journalists who see the whole weekend as an opportunity to connect with stimulating art and have a good time in each other’s company.

Wilson notes that there are plenty of folks who, like Shackleton, have had an evolving relationship with True/False over the festival’s lifetime, including one of his favorite moments from this year. In the early days of the festival, he recruited a friend to help out on staff, and the family celebrated his infant daughter’s birthday during March March, True/False’s annual parade held every year on the Friday of the event. Now, the friend’s daughter is 18, and she’s a volunteer.

“She came back to attend Mizzou and study photography. She volunteered as part of the photo team,” Wilson says. “I got to see this kid, who I’ve known since she was a baby, photographing March March.”

Featured films at True/False hit on a range of topics—Shackleton’s Zodiac Killer Project was one of two documentaries at the festival commenting on true crime. Shackleton’s film was a cinematic essay about a scrapped film based on Lyndon Lafferty’s book The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up: The Silenced Badge. In the absence of an actual documentary, Shackleton instead describes the movie that would have been, using his existing b-roll footage and descriptions of comparable projects to cheekily comment on the exploitative, uncreative state of true-crime filmmaking.

The other true crime film was David Osit’s Predators, which examined the complicated legacy of NBC’s series To Catch a Predator. Osit’s interviews with the show’s host, former decoys, and the YouTube copycats the show inspired after its cancellation are an interesting complement to Shackleton’s film, offering real-life insights alongside his theoretical ones. It’s perhaps not surprising to find out that Shackleton’s and Osit’s films are, in a sense, literal siblings, not just thematic ones: Shackleton worked on Predators as an editor.

“We had so many conversations about the shared dialogue between our two films even though they’re tonally different,” Shackleton says. “The number of conversations we had praying we’d both get into True/False and now to have them coexist on the festival circuit… it feels like the culmination of many conversations in bars.”

A number of standout films at this year’s festival included stories about activism, appropriately (if unintentionally) timed for a moment when a need for inspirational stories about change-making are needed more than ever. Deaf President Now!—directed by Davis Guggenheim and Nyle DiMarco—told the story of student protests at Gallaudet University in 1988, as students at the Deaf university pushed for the school to elect the first Deaf president in its 124-year history.

Middletown, from Girls State directors Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine, detailed the story of high school students in Middletown, New York, and their teacher, in the early ‘90s, as they embarked on a high-stakes investigative journalism project. Ian Bell’s WTO/99 used archival footage to tell the story of the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization protests, deepening the often-shared narrative of riots, police brutality, and violence into a more complicated story about a crucial moment in the relationship between big business and global politics.

One of Shackleton’s favorites (and one brought up by several attendees throughout the weekend) was Myrid Carten’s A Want in Her, about the filmmaker’s difficult relationship with her mother, an addict.

“I was completely blown away by it. It’s an incredible portrait of a mother-daughter relationship that’s on one level very emotionally direct and affecting, but also inventive and unexpected,” Shackleton says. “The things it’s doing, if someone had described it to me, I don’t think I’d have imagined liking the film, but they cohere so perfectly.”

Wilson, who stepped away from creative leadership of the festival but remains involved as a board member, says he’s proud of how the direction of True/False has evolved under the current creative team.

“They’re doing great work,” he says. “It gives me indescribable pleasure to have a thing I helped build, then step away and watch other people work magic with it.” 

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