True/False 2019: Scenes from the Resistance

There are always countervailing narratives at True/False (and, I imagine, at other documentary festivals). For every apocalyptic cautionary tale, there is an account of people resisting the horrors of their times. This year was no different. These kinds of films provide an uplift if you've just seen some of the dystopian nightmares presented in other films. Usually. Sometimes they're ambivalent.

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True/False 2019: A Boot to the Face Forever

George Orwell, ever the optimist, once suggested that "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face--forever." This undercurrent of despair underlines several of this year's documentaries, which chronicle the future of labor, the future of governments, the pre-apocalyptic mood of generations waiting for climate change to get worse, and the underlying sickness afflicting everything.

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True/False 2019: The Queen of Soul and the Queen of the Bronx

Amazing Grace (2018, directed by Sydney Pollack and completed by Alan Elliot) chronicles the recording of the album of the same name by Aretha Franklin. The album remains the biggest-selling Gospel album ever recorded; the film has sat unreleased for nearly fifty years, beset by technical problem that have only been correctable with the advances of filmmaking technology of the present era, and by Franklin's own dissatisfaction with the film. I think I "get" why Franklin might have had qualms. As presented in what is basically a church service, she sublimates her own personality to the decorum of religion, something of which the Rev. James Cleveland reminds the audience at the outset. There is certainly a patriarchy at work in the musical and religious traditions from which this is drawn (Ray Charles, for example, famously appropriated the call and response dynamic of a male preacher revving up a choir). Aretha doesn't really talk much in the film--she's there to sing after all--but Cleveland and Aretha's father sure do. There's also a curious merging of the religious and the secular, which is pronounced even if it is at the heart of soul music in the first place.

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True/False 2019 Day One: Moonshots and Provocations

I thought last year's True/False Film Festival was an off year, in spite of crowd-pleasers like Three Identical Strangers and Won't You Be My Neighbor in the line-up. I mean, I had a good time and I saw some really good films, but I've gotten jaded in the last few years. I've been expecting something to knock me on my ass the way something like The Look of Silence or Stories We Tell did, and it hasn't been happening. Those kinds of films are once in a generation films, I suppose. It's entirely possible that I just hit the lows last year and the other films were amazing, but you never know. The first two films I saw at this year's festival are reason enough to think this year will be better. In fact, it's probably already better.

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