Well folks, it has come time for me to close out my first ever True/False Film Fest. It has been an amazing time, but I will do an overview to the whole festival with pictures and videos and a bunch of praise. For now I want to keep this recap strictly to the films and experiences I had during the festival and get you excited for upcoming, full length reviews.
Like every morning, I get up, change and head out to grab some grub courtesy of Lakota and their Chai and pastries. One the agenda for the final day of the festival were 4 films and a closing party to end the fest. What I didn’t realize once I started the day as to how sad I was that this was all ending and the fact that my first film was a powerful and touching documentary on the struggles of AID’s activists in the mid 80s and early 90s. As a straight male, I don’t have a frame of reference to connect with them on a lifestyle level, but the film pulled you in at an emotional level that leaves you with a hopeful outlook.
How to Survive a Plague @ Jesse Auditorium
I was born in 1985, during the heyday of the AID epidemic and right when it was starting to show up on the mainstream news. I only read about it in history class in high school as my catholic middle school would rather not bring anything like that up. So I only had a cursory knowledge of the disease and what it did to those that were infected. I didn’t know what to expect really going into the documentary, but what I witnessed had so much impact and meaning that it made you apart of the movement and the moment.
Director David France edited and stitched together archival footage, amassing nearly 700 hours of footage, taken during the early stages of the Gay and AID’s rights movement. An intimate look at the struggles and victories of the ACT UP organization, headed by prominent members of the Gay community and having a start in the city of Greenwich Village, NY. Through all the footage, France managed to patchwork together footage that told a sweeping movement of hope and despair, life and death, and a memorial for those who fought the fight to get the goverment to care about the AID’s epidemic.
How ever you feel about the Gay community, love or hate them, what they accomplished in terms of getting the government to care about it’s people is nothing short of amazing. Through powerful protests and an uncompromising spirit, they became their own drug testers, pharmacists and adovcates. They had to learn about drug treatments, lobby and use every possible means of communication and organization to their disposal, all for the goal of just surviving. The documentary is a powerful message of hope that resonates in today’s politically volatile world. The Occupy Movement could take a few page notes from their playbook.
I will come right out and say this, I was moved to tears in this documentary. The interviews of those who were on the frontlines of the battles relive the anguish of their battles, knowing full well that they might not even live to see a change being made to drug testing and governmental policy. Their interviews and recounting of stories were amazing and moving, but also sad as you can see them struggle with the notion that so many of their friends never made it to the end. By far and away one of the most amazingly well done and emotional documentaries on the subject and truly an amazing experience in getting to see this film. I won’t spoil what happened during the Q&A which you will need to wait for the full review to come out.
Bully @ Missouri Theater
When a film makes you tear up and you can hear audible sobbing in the giant theater that this film took place in, you know that you are in for a powerful documentary. Bully is documentary that hits a little to close to home for a lot of people. It’s a serious issue in America when you hear about so many young kids taking their lives because kids are ruthless and they feel that they no one to turn to. Bully is private look at the pain and anguish of families and teen that are affected by bullying. Director Lee Hirsch brings us the stories of multiple subjects across the land, some of the subjects are teens that are bullied because of their looks or sexual affiliation. The other subjects are the parents of teens who have committed suicide or struggling to cope with their child being bullied.
But it isn’t just about their stories, Hirsch turns the focus on the environments in schools and how administrators do absolutely nothing to combat this problem. It is the mentality that boys will be boys and you can’t change that. They turn bullies into victims and the victims into bullies, looking to do the minimal amount of intervening to correct the issue. Hirsch managed to produce footage that will make you outraged and angry at the adminstrators and appaled by how teens can so carelessly talk about maiming and hurting other teens. Watching the young kids talk about not feeling anything anymore or talking about suicide makes your heart hurt. You sit at the screen and just want to hug them and tell them that it will be ok in th end.
I was a victim of bullying. I was the fat kid (still am really but at least I can fuck some shit up now) and I understand what it was like for them at their age. This film hits so close to home and that is a sign of an amazing documentary. It is about finding that emotional button and pressing it to make you care about the subject. Bully played to a pack theater and I am talking about a 1200 seat theater, but the most amazing thing about the experience of watching it was the standing ovation that it received once the credits rolled. This is something that we can all relate to, either as the bullied or bully, it is a mirror that reflects the fallacies in our policies and attitudes towards bullying, but also gives us something to strive for.
Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present @ The Blue Note
I have gone on the record of saying that I am not much of a mordern art fan, either painting, sculpting or performance art. I just can’t seem to get involved enough in the scene and rather just dismiss more often than not. Listen, there is good performance art that can move you and view art in a whole new light or there is the bad performance that just makes a mockery of the movement and turns people like me off of the scene. The Artist is Present is an example of good performance art.
I have never heard of Marina Abramovic before, so I am not going to pretend I have to save face. The documentary by debut Director Matthew Akers, peers into the open world of Marina’s performance art as she is poised to showcase her masterpiece gallery at MoMA. Marina is an open soul, one who doesn’t shy away from feelings or giving insight into what makes her tick as an artist. Her past works prominently showcase her ability to blur the line between art and indecency. It’s not to say that her art is in any lewd or lacivious, but her past performances have increasingly reduced the barrier between artist and audience. She trekked across the Great Wall of China to meet her lover who was walking from the other end of her starting position, meeting in the middle. She bares her body and uses it as a canvas to display the disparity between couples in a dynamic power position. She allowed the audience to pin items to her body, making them the artist and her the canvas. It is the pure essence of performance art, which she has been bestowed the tittle of “Godmother of Performance Art”.
So what could Marina possibly do that will top her past performances, well the film follows her lead up to the grand opening her gallery at MoMA, where she will literally remove that barrier between audience and artist by inviting the audience to sit down face to face with for 3 months and 10 plus hours a day. The aim of the performance is to remove that once, hallowed barrier that separates art from life and marries the two with a simple concept. Human connection is at the heart of art, as we need the audience to feed into our art that produces the works that we connect with. So the concept of human eye contact between both artist and audience seems so simple and easy. But when you think about that, we don’t make eye contact anymore or at least meaningful eye contact. There is something so disarming and emotional when you just look into the eyes of a person, peering into their character and what makes them human.
Marina is an imposing, but powerfully moving figure in the art world. People were lined up for days just to get a chance to sit in front of her for a few minutes and take part in her art. Akers managed to focus on the subjects and their interaction with Marina, some smiling, some staring right back at her and other breaking down and crying. It is the simplest act in the world that we avoid, but it is also one of the most personal things that can be done, connecting with a human being just by sitting and looking at one another. An impressive figure and a dynamic portrait of an artist and her pursuit for pushing performance art to its limits.
The Imposter @ The Blue Note
The final film of the festival and one that I have been hearing a lot about from numerous people in queues and on twitter. The Imposter is a meticulous film that almost seems more fiction than non-fiction. The story revolves around the disappearance of a young boy from a San Antonio suburb, missing at such a young age when seemingly out of nowhere, the family receives a call that say their missing boy has been found in Spain, 3 years after his disappearance. What unfolds is a narrative that manipulates the audience and the family involved with a seeming too good to be true story.
I honestly don’t want to give away too much of this film, as I will dive into it more once I can get an official review done for it. Director Bart Layton creates a compelling and tense film that centers around the real exploits of a case where mistaken identity and family troubles make for a film that seems too good to be true. The twists, turns and utter manipulation in the film just plays up to the ideals of the True/False Fest. Layton managed to develop a non-fiction approach to something that might have been a made for tv movie, instead he chose to create a hybrid that incorporate recreated scenes, archival footage, and interviews of those involved with the case of a missing kid and stolen identity.
It is the perfect film that hids in the shadowns, clouding our perception and piecing together lies and truth into a harmonious film that leaves the audience with a bit of story to savor. It gets us to think about how films use stories and presents them to us, trying to seem genuine while managing to feel like a fiction film. Overall I was pleased that I got to end the Fest with this film and sad that the experience is over.
I want to say thank you to the True/False Fest for their incredible lineup of films and musicians and making the overall festival experience accessible to everyone. I can’t even begin to express my adoration for all that took place, but I will try in one final post that has me going over my favorite films of the fest and posting what photos and videos I have. More grandstanding and thanks to be had, but at a later date. Thanks everyone for following along and reading what a noob film blogger has to say about the festival life.
