Every March, the college town of Columbia, Missouri, swells with documentary filmmakers, movie fans, students, and culturally curious locals all lining up in front of churches, a nightclub that doubles as a screening venue, and the stalwart independent two-screen theater, the Ragtag Cinema. The annual True/False Film Festival is a short yet focused event that explores the boundaries of nonfiction filmmaking.
This year, the lineup boasted a number of thought-provoking and mesmerizing works, including standouts from Sundance like “Barbara Forever,” “Aanikoobijigan,” and “Time and Water,” other festival favorites like “Remake” and “True North,” and premieres including “The Great Experiment” and “Phenomena.”
Hansel Porras Garcia’s documentary “Tropical Park” exemplified the festival’s experimental nature. Like the Ross brothers’ excellent film, “Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets,” “Tropical Park” is something of a fiction/nonfiction hybrid, using a situational setup with actors who improvise their dialogue and reactions to explore something true-to-life.
In “Tropical Park,” a brother, Frank (Ariel Texidó), takes his sister Fanny (Lola Bosch) for a driving lesson at a local park. They have been separated for over twenty years and have only been reunited for a month when Fanny immigrated from Cuba to live with her brother and his family in Miami. While in the car, the two tease each other, argue over communism, and reminisce about schoolyard memories, but as the driving lesson gets underway, so do thornier discussions, like Frank needing Fanny to move out and her pain over their father’s rejection of her transition. The emotional talk turns heated, then tearful, as the two navigate issues of immigration, isolation, transphobia, family, and belonging.
According to Porras Garcia, during a post-screening Q&A, the two actors were given only biographies of their characters and rehearsed their feature-length conversation once before shooting the single take (there are no cuts or edits throughout the film) that audiences see on screen. Using only a 12-page script, the pair launched into their improvised argument with breathless ease, adapting to the challenge of acting with their backs towards the camera for most of the movie. With the headrests missing, the camera in the back seat of the car captures each side-eye glance, tear-stained cheek, and empathetic touch between brother and sister.
In what feels like an all-too-rare occasion, the film also paints a nuanced portrait of the Cuban and Cuban-American experience, exploring the tension between generations of arrivals and the ideological differences within a community too easily lumped into a monolith. It can feel claustrophobic to watch such an explosion of pent-up emotions in a small sedan, possibly uncorking some of the audience’s own unspoken feelings. But that’s exactly what makes “Tropical Park” so incredibly compelling.
There were more vulnerable confessions shared in Pete Muller’s “Bucks Harbor,” a surprising trek through northern New England to follow subjects in the lobster-fishing town of Machias, Maine. At first, Muller’s film feels like a descendant of Errol Morris’ quirky classic, “Vernon, Florida,” complete with wild stories and funny moments that earned laughs from the early morning crowd, but as the movie goes on, it extends beyond regional characters and eccentricities to a deeper look at the role of tough guy culture, cyclical trauma, and what healing later in life may look like.
Filled with stunning nature photography of windswept coastlines, deer traipsing through powdery snow, and many close-ups of lobsters, “Bucks Harbor” immerses viewers in small-town life in Maine, showing the muddy drudgery of clam-digging, the perils of lobster fishing, and the hardscrabble life many families have had to make for themselves. Men show off their collection of roadkill pelts, regale the audience with stories of taking down a state trooper by the balls and running from the law, and remember relatives lost at sea.
As they share their stories, we get to know them; they show different sides of themselves: one had artistic aspirations when he was younger, and his creativity still manifests today, another enjoys dressing in feminine clothes for online fans, and another is trying to model better parenting for his two boys as they learn the family business. Some wounds may never heal, but in their own quiet way, these men are redefining what masculinity means to them.
Even lobsters become vulnerable when they shed their skin, and Muller leans into that concept and visual metaphor as the men’s stories grow more introspective, showing a lobster emerging anew from its old husk. He crafts a quilt from the men’s stories, interweaving them with shots of their environment and their hopes for the future. “Bucks Harbor” feels intimate and slightly unfiltered, but it retains a sense of rugged beauty as the men grow from their experiences.
Questioning the norms and expectations of a place and culture is also at the heart of Leah Galant’s thought-provoking film “Landscapes of Memory.” Celebrating its world premiere at this year’s True/False, Galant’s film moves between her home in the States as she reflects on her family’s history and where her father is dying of ALS, and out in Germany, where she questions the way the country remembers the Holocaust.
Galant begins her story in the year following the pandemic, asking her ailing father about his thoughts on her upcoming trek to Germany and his memories of their family, including his grandfather, who survived the Holocaust. Once in Berlin, Galant takes her camera to many of the city’s Holocaust memorials, into conferences, and out to concentration camps, to get a sense of the country’s work on memory culture, but remarks that, as a Jewish American, it felt strange to be surrounded by tributes to Jewish death.
The longer she stays in Germany, she observes Germany’s far-right party weaponizing Holocaust memorials to stoke nationalist furor and how the efforts to criminalize antisemitism have led to the rise of censorship of Palestinian protestors. This makes even the act of waving the Palestinian flag a crime.
“Landscapes of Memory” is a delicate work, balancing several emotional issues at once. It is about grief and action; not forgetting the past, but also a call to not use it to oppress people in the present. Galant shares the camera’s focus with other activists working in this space—including historian Johannes, whose grandfather was involved with the Nazi party; Elias, the descendant of a Holocaust survivor and an artist also questioning the concept of memory culture; and Michael, a Palestinian artist increasingly frustrated by the way his community is under siege in Germany and in Gaza.
In one poignant scene, Michael marvels at a wall at a concentration camp, one that reminds him of the walls back home that keep Israelis and Palestinians separated. “There’s no competition in human suffering,” he says mournfully, wishing for the end of all walls like this one. “If our memories don’t change us, what’s the point of remembering?” Galant asks. In her brief but powerful film, she also leaves us with much to think about and discuss.