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| A Fanboy’s Notes: The True Delights of True/False 2009 |
Ondi Timoner and Josh Harris, the team behind “We Live in Public.” Photo by Lybarger. |
by Dan Lybarger
Last
week some of the most important movies of 2009, or potentially years to
come, unspooled far away from Hollywood or New York in the middle of
Missouri. Despite the seemingly remote location, documentary filmmakers
from across the globe descended on Columbia, Mo. for the sixth annual
True/False Film Festival.
Yes, I am a gushy fanboy, but I’ll stand by my previous statement.
Last year’s True/False brought both the makers of the Oscar-winning documentaries Taxi to the Dark Side and Man on Wire to town.
This was not a fluke. Director Joe Berlinger who has earned two Emmys for his work is a frequent visitor.
As
a Kansas City movie geek with a limited budget, True/False is the sort
of event that I once thought I could only dream about. Imagine that a
mere two hours from where I lived I could watch primo documentaries and
get to meet the people behind them.
You’re probably thinking, “Wow. How exciting. I think I’ll go balance my checkbook or trim my fingernails instead.”
If you find documentaries to be stale, True/False might just change your mind.
For
one thing, the festival demonstrates that the definition of documentary
is getting broader. This year True/False featured Ari Folman’s animated
memoir Waltz with Bashir and the often hysterically funny look at the activist pranksters the Yes Men.
Tiger Hospitality
Much
of the appeal of True/False goes well beyond the movies. The city of
Columbia itself is part of the charm. The metro area has over 100,000
people and is the home of the University of Missouri, home of the Tigers.
Because
my girlfriend’s and my allegiance to belong to the University of Kansas
(she works as a librarian there), I had to contend with locals who
despised my beloved Jayhawks. But that anxiety was gone when KU
clobbered the Tigers in basketball the day after I left.
Compared to my current home, it feels pleasantly small, but it’s hardly a backwater. Columbia is also home to Columbia College and Stevens College, who both contribute to True/False.
There are also
dozens of unique eateries so you can grab something more nourishing and
tasty than a Big Mac or a tub of popcorn between flicks. In my two days
there, I got to sample succulent cheeseburgers at Booches, Thai delicacies at Bangkok Gardens and steaming cheese and crust at Shakespeare’s Pizza. Because I was on duty, alcohol was out. But I did have a couple of stiff hits of tea at the Cherry Street Artisan and Kaldi coffeehouses.
All
of these places were just a few blocks from each other, so I could walk
off the calories I had consumed. Placing all the events within
strolling distance was a huge blessing because many of the filmmakers
had flown in to St. Louis or Kansas City from the coasts and lacked
cars.
The weather at the end of February was windy and cold.
Angelinos had a rough time adapting. Fortunately, Columbia’s
hospitality more than compensated.
The volunteers who helped
organize True/False were consistently accommodating and worked with the
guest filmmakers, visiting documentary enthusiasts and annoying
journalists like me. The local press liaison had to field dozens of
calls just from me. Downtown Columbia has a fairly easy layout to
follow, but that didn’t prevent me from getting lost when I first got
to town. Fortunately, she got me to my destination, and the interviews
I conducted when smoothly.
True/False is the brainchild of RagTag Cinema owners David Wilson and Paul Sturtz, but it’s folks like her that make it run.
The Opening Act
If
you wanted a break from all the documentaries, there was the Gimme
Truth event, where the audience and a panel of judges had to determine
if short films presented to them are genuine or spoofs. You could also
catch the Friday night parade through downtown.
One enjoyable idiosyncrasy of True/False is that the movies don’t begin with tedious “pre-show entertainment,” which is an annoyingly mendacious euphemism for commercials you can see it home.
Instead
musicians who come in from across the country play a half-dozen tunes
before the feature documentary starts. While I was waiting for We Live
in Public, I had the unexpected pleasure of hearing a haunting set from
former X lead singer Exene Cervenka.
She was accompanied by a Hammond organist and another acoustic
guitarist, and the analog sound made an intriguing counterpoint to the
documentary about the impact of digital media on our lives.
I also got to hear a descendant of Hank Williams, Sr., named Brody Douglas Hunt,
whose songs have the same captivating melancholy that his forbearer’s
did. I was also able to catch singer Steve Carrel, who is cursed with a
name all too similar to that of The Office star Steve Carell. Googling
him and his music is a little hard but definitely worth it.
We Live in Public
While
visiting Columbia is a treat, I came to True/False primarily to check
out the films. The first one I caught, Ondi Timonoer’s We Live in Public,
was an engrossing cautionary tale about the not-so-distant past. Joshua
M. Harris founded the online research firm Jupiter Communications and
Pseudo Programs, which was a sophisticated network of television
programs that viewers could watch on the Web. He started the latter in
1994, when few Internet users had the broadband connections to watch
his content.
Despite having made nearly $80 million, Harris
decided to stage a grandiose experiment in 1999 when he persuaded
nearly 100 New Yorkers to live in a bunker where their every activity
was monitored through webcams. Keep in mind this is before the flood of
reality shows. Harris was able to tap into electronic voyeurism years
before others.
As a naïve Baptist boy from Kansas, I expected
people to behave in a reserved manner if they knew they were being
monitored at every moment. The opposite happened.
Timoner includes some chilling and occasionally beautiful moments when the residents of Quiet: We Live in Public abandon any inhibitions they might have had.
But the messy resolution of Harris’ Quiet
experiment was only a prelude to when he became his own lab rat. He and
his then girlfriend placed cameras all over their apartment so web
viewers could observe and comment on everything they did. Needless to
say, the relationship wilted under the glare of the cameras.
That
Harris’ rise and fall is involving can be attributed to Timoner’s
intimate approach. In addition to providing some important history
about how the web developed, she took part in the Quiet experiment and
unflinchingly presents Harris’ astonishing foresight and as well as his
more disturbing actions. She can make viewers care about Harris even
when his downfall seems self-inflicted. If the applause Harris received
at a screening of the film is any indication, she can present people
behaving questionably and still not make viewers dislike them. This may
explain why Timoner won her second documentary directing prize at this
year’s Sundance Film Festival (the first was for her terrific
rockumentary Dig!.
She
also illustrates how Harris’ story can be an urgent warning about how
dependent our society has become on the Web and how privacy is quickly
becoming a thing of the past. That will teach you to post a beach photo
of yourself on MySpace.
Crude
In his work with Bruce
Sinofsky, Joe Berlinger has managed to deal with emotionally volatile
subjects without slipping into didacticism. In Brother’s Keeper and Paradise Lost
the two filmmakers allowed both sides to state their views and left
viewers to reach their own conclusions. It’s what cable news networks
claim they do but never manage to accomplish.
With Crude,
Berlinger looks at how 30 years of pollution from Texaco could be
responsible for the deaths of thousands in Ecuador. Streams that once
provided fish are now dead from buried petroleum waste, and locals are
still getting sick from cancer and other afflictions years after Texaco
left the area.
Berlinger follows the case by
presenting the Ecuadorian plaintiff’s attorneys Pablo Fajardo and his
American counterpart Steven Donziger. Fajardo’s commitment to the long,
intricate case is formidable, and it’s impressive how he has worked his
way up from being a laborer to taking on Chevron, who merged with
Texaco back in the 90s.
Donziger is also fascination to
accompany but for different reasons. He diligently coaches his clients
on how they should express themselves in and out of the courtroom.
While I would love to have an attorney with his dedication handling any
case I might have, he can get amusingly overbearing.
As a
result, both he and a Chevron lawyer who winds up indicted by the end
of the film provide the film with some unintended laughs. Neither dry
and academic, nor a screed, Crude presents a convincing argument for
Texaco’s guilt while acknowledging the case is complicated and that
other companies like the Ecuadorian PetroEcuador have contributed to
the ecological nightmare. Berlinger has a point of view on the matter,
but it’s fortunate that he allows viewers to walk away from the film
with perspectives of their own.
I’m ambivalent about the footage
of Trudie Styler and her husband Sting in the movie. It can get
annoying listening to celebrities commenting on environmental issues.
Some are smarter than others. Both Styler and Sting have been deeply
committed to preserving the Amazon for decades, so it’s reassuring that
they aren’t merely jumping on a bandwagon. That said, Fajardo’s quest
is compelling on its own.
True/False may have been the ideal place to catch Crude.
As he walked up to the stage to answer questions, Berlinger said,
“First of all, I wanted to thank this festival and the town. Even
though it’s really cold weather-wise, this is an incredibly warm and
friendly town, which I appreciate. To be able to fill this theater with
a subtitled documentary about people dying of cancer on the Amazon says
a lot about this community.”
The Yes Men Fix the World
Andy
Bichlbaum and Mike Bonnano are pranksters whose gags are devoted to a
higher cause. The two devote themselves to exposing corporate or
government skullduggery by pretending to be shills. In some cases, they
propose outrageous ideas that sound a little too much like the malarkey
real mouthpieces utter. In attacking Dow for their pollution
policies, the Yes Men argue that the only good skeletons in the closest
are golden ones. That means risking the health and well-being of others
is all right if you can make enough money to cover it.
While the
cinema audience laughs at their often hilariously absurd gags (get a
load of how you can live through a disaster by wearing your
SurvivaBall, courtesy of Halliburton), the suits at the conferences where Bichlbaum and Bonnano speak simply nod as if they’ve become inured to balderdash.
The stars of a previous 2004 film, the Yes Men directed The Yes Men Fix the World
themselves and add some amusing transition sequences between their
pranks where they sit in an abandoned lot waiting for their next
“mission.”
The new film is framed around the 2005 incident where Bichlbaum went on the BBC pretending to be a Dow spokesman offering to pay for the damage Union Carbide (now part of Dow) inflicted on Bhopal, India back in the 1980s. Bichlbaum’s statement caused the company’s stock value to drop by two billion dollars in a mere 23 minutes.
As we find out later, the people in Bhopal, while saddened that Dow
wouldn’t be addressing the situation, enjoyed watching the company
taking a hit.
Bichlbaum was greeted with a standing ovation
after the film was over. Who knew that practical jokes could do more
than get a laugh?
That’s All Folks
The weather made
getting out of Missouri difficult for the visitors, but many still come
back to our less than sunny region because we really care about good
documentaries and the people who make them. While I was there I ran
into Kirby Dick, the director of This Film Is Not Yet Rated, who attended simply to catch the latest docs. Several commentators have noticed
that escapist fare is doing rather well in this glum economy.
True/False demonstrates that looking at the real world can be good for
your soul as well. For more True/False pictures, click here.
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link directly to this feature at http://www.efilmcritic.com/feature.php?feature=2702
originally posted: 03/08/09 04:10:38
last updated: 03/08/09 09:30:11
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