True/False 2025: “Valentina and the MUOSters”

Valentina is adrift. Nearing 27 years old, she still lives with her parents in her hometown of Niscemi, Sicily, a place whose natural landscape is slowly deteriorating thanks to wildfires that ravage the forests, and MUOS (Mobile User Objective Systems) that dot the landscape. The satellites, part of an American base and— as cuts to […]

True/False 2025: “River of Grass”

“I remember nature always creeping in.” Those words, spoken by writer and director Sasha Wortzel in her debut documentary feature River of Grass in reference to how growing up in Florida, the natural world existed in tandem with the human one— she speaks of finding tree frogs in the toilet, opossums in the yard— immediately […]

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 […]

True/False 2023 Dispatch: “Tavuri,” “Three Women,” “The Stroll”

For my sixth and final dispatch from this year’s True/False Film Festival, I’m reviewing the final three documentaries I saw: Tavuri, the wild story of a con artist; the tender slice of life Three Women; and the powerful story of NYC’s trans sex workers, The Stroll, which is coming to HBO later this year. Read […]

True False 2023 Dispatch: “Art Talent Show,” “Time Bomb Y2K,” “How to Have an American Baby”

For my fifth dispatch from the 2023 True/False Film Festival, I’m spotlighting three documentaries that are all preoccupied with capturing a moment in time: the hilarious Art Talent Show and Time Bomb Y2K, and the gut-wrenching How to Have an American Baby. Read my capsule reviews of those films below. ART TALENT SHOW dirs. Adéla […]