True/False 2024 Dispatch: “Daughters,” “Ibelin,” “Agent of Happiness”

For my final dispatch from this year’s True/False Film Festival, I’m highlight three movies that had their world premieres at Sundance at the start of the year. They are also all, coincidentally, highly emotional works, accomplishing everything from memorializing a life to examining what makes people happy to highlighting the need for systemic change in […]

True/False 2024 Dispatch: “Allo la France,” “A Band of Dreamers and a Judge,” “sr”

This collection of capsule reviews from the 2024 True/False Film Festival is all about quests: movies in which a filmmaker goes on a road trip to locate her country’s last remaining phone booths (Allo la France), in which stories involving giraffes across human history are gathered from virtually every corner of the world (sr), and […]

True/False 2024 Dispatch: “Obsolete,” “Boyz,” “Alien Island”

In this dispatch from the 2024 True/False Film Festival, I’m looking at two observational films that center around people at very different points in their lives. Sylvain Cruiziat’s Boyz depicts a trio of zoomer friends coming face-to-face with their vulnerabilities at a transitional moment in their lives, while Sumira Roy’s Obsolete looks at an elderly […]

True/False 2024 Dispatch: “Three Promises,” “A Photographic Memory,” “Background”

Quite a few films that screened at the 2024 True/False Film Festival dealt with memory, using photos and videos of the past to create a dialogue with the present. The three films I’ve reviewed below all take this approach in a broad sense, but use it to different ends: to learn about a mother her […]

True/False 2024 Dispatch: “As the Tide Comes In,” “The Other Profile,” “Flying Lessons”

This theme of this year’s True/False Film Festival was “the human paradox”, and while such complicated questions as what it means to be human and live a fulfilling life, often in a world where the odds are stacked against you, was evident across all the film’s programmed at the annual non-fiction festival, the immense variety […]

True/False 2024 Dispatch: “There Was, There Was Not,” “1489”

Displacement has been a common theme across many of the films I’ve watched at this year’s True/False Film Festival, the annual event in Columbia, Missouri celebrating nonfiction filmmaking, and with the current genocide unfolding in Palestine, each of them feels particularly urgent. Coincidentally, two Armenian films by women documenting the Artsakh War and the way […]

Berlinale Dispatch: “Dahomey,” “My Stolen Planet,” “Hands in the Fire”

For this dispatch from the 74th Berlinale, I’m looking at three films (coincidentally all directed by women) that merge history and filmmaking. Mati Diop’s magnificent Dahomey and Iranian filmmaker Farahnaz Sharifi’s My Stolen Planet both operate in the nonfiction sphere, while Portuguese director Margarida Gil’s Hands in the Fire is a loose adaptation of Henry […]

Berlinale Review: “Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger”

If you know movies, you probably know Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger— if not by name, than by the indelible images they created in their films. The infinite staircase connecting earth with the afterlife in A Matter of Life and Death; the vibrant reds in the ballet at the center of The Red Shoes; the […]

Berlinale Review: “Henry Fonda for President”

He’s tall and thin, and speaks in a tone and cadence that I can only describe as regular— neither too booming, nor too quiet. He can employ these traits in a couple of different directions: for comedy, tripping over his lanky frame, awkward and stuttering (especially when around women— think of his brush-ups with a […]

Review: “Bye Bye Tiberias”

Hiam Abbass craved escape. At least, that’s what she remembers. As she rifles through a stack of letters she wrote to her parents shortly after her mother’s passing, she is specifically searching for the one she penned to explain to them why she left home, because she can’t quite recall what she said in it. […]