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The other group we serve, equally important in our eyes, is our local audience. Their enthusiasm to volunteer, to come out for films, to ask questions and engage with the films is our secret weapon. Columbia is a great town, and though there’s not as much going on here as in a big city, when something does happen, the community can get behind it in a major way. I’d put our crowds up against any festival in the world. They’re a HUGE part of why True/False has succeeded.
iW: It seems that you’ve made “fun” and “entertainment” a central part of the festival between bands and the parade, did that evolve on itself or was that a conscious decision on your part?
Paul & David: I think this was definitely a clear decision on our part. Both Paul and I love to throw a good party, and we both love balancing the serious with the unserious. Just because our minds are being fed all day with big ideas and grand filmmaking doesn’t mean we can’t party all night. The bands that play here (before every screening) were an idea that dates back to the early days of our film series, when our friend Jordan would show up with his accordion and serenade the audiences as they filed in.
We felt like it brought another whole level of spectacle to the screenings and that’s a big part of what I love about True/False. People have plenty of reasons to stay home and watch TV or movies or whatever these days - getting them into a theater is about building an unmissable event. Hopefully all of the “non-movie” elements of True/False add to that unmissability.
iW: Why do you think T/F is a good event for filmmakers to screen their work?
Paul & David: First off, our six theaters are all unique venues perfect for enjoying films. They include two 1920s-era movie palaces (one of which is now a nightclub), an elegant old ballroom in an old hotel, and our headquarter theaters at the Ragtag Cinema, a converted Coca Cola bottling plant that’s attached to a bakery and bar-lounge. All these theaters are within walking distance of each other, and our sidewalks tend to be remarkably slush-free. Mostly though, it’s the audiences in Columbia. In all our travels, we haven’t seen anything like them. Large, voracious groups of people completely jazzed about non-fiction films. They’re why Alex Gibney calls Columbia “nirvana for documentary filmmakers,” and it’s why James Marsh says, “The whole town is alive with passionate debate about documentaries.”
iW: What are highlights of this year’s 6th edition you’re looking forward to?
Paul & David: We feel like 2009 is a really well-rounded lineup - probably one of our strongest overall lineups ever. We’re also proud of the number of films (and filmmakers) coming from outside of the U.S. We’ve put work into scouting and building our relationships with the doc community of other countries and we think it’s really paying off.
iW: How do you both go about programming the festival?
Paul & David: We’re basically scavengers, with a look of desperation in our eyes. Always clamoring for titles. It’s a lengthy process, starting with talking to people we trust around the world. People like [“A Walk into the Sea” director] Esther Robinson, who when she says, “Oh you’ve gotta check out “Loot,” we heed her word. Or [“Imelda” director] Ramona Diaz, who also has impeccable taste. And we have created a 19-year-old doc-finding cyborg named Chris Boeckmann, who does the most outrageously inventive Web searches to find new films that may only be an inkling in their creator’s eyes at the time.
We fly to other festivals too, although ecologically we endorse what IDFA did this year of posting most of their selections online. This was a godsend. We all need to figure out ways to cut down on air travel. Then of course there are submissions. We received around 550 films, and they were each watched by at least one person on our committee. Every week we’d have a viewing party and this was a great way to calibrate our collective tastes. Sometimes we’d all really fall in line, but oftentimes there’d be some healthy arguments.
iW: How do you hope T/F will evolve going forward?
Paul & David: We believe that going forward is not synonymous with getting bigger in terms of number of days of the fest or venues or attendees or awards. We think that kind of chest-pounding is the downfall of many festivals. It really means getting deeper with what we’re doing. This translates into creating a more profound experience for those that come to our fest for the weekend and the way that weekend resonates in the world. So for our True Life Fund in which we raise money for the subjects of a film - this year it’s the underground journalists featured in “Burma VJ” - it means doing more outreach in our community over a longer period of time and linking issues with our local schools. For our SWAMI program in which industry veterans give unfiltered distribution advice to first-time filmmakers, it means broadening its reach so that mentoring can extend well beyond the short meetings that we set up.
On the curating side, we’re intensely interested in broadening our understanding of films being made outside our current grasp. And that will involve cultivating our spies in other countries, far from the non-fiction meccas like Copenhagen and London. We’re also interested in exploring with filmmakers, other festivals, and independent moviehouses the idea of a cohesive, integrated network for launching films in the world - we see festivals as a natural launching point for films and we need to work more cooperatively to transcend the premiere game and to pay filmmakers real money for their hard work.
iW: You both see a lot of docs throughout the year, what trends do you see happening now? Has the world financial crisis and years of war fatigue at home had any effect in the types of films being produced in the last year or now?
Paul & David: Doc trends are funny things. Most films take at least a year, if not three or five or ten, to complete. So while there are certainly films that feel very “of the moment,” it’s usually more complicated than the sort of ripped-from-the-headlines stuff we might see on TV. That said, we’ve been struck by the number of films that came our way this year about reporting. Docs that are not simply journalism themselves, but ones that question and discuss the theory and practice of what it means to actually be a reporter.
Eric Daniel Metzgar’s film about Nicholas Kristof (“Reporter”) is an obvious example here, but those same themes, with some variation, pop up in “Blood Trail,” “Burma VJ” and others. This feels like more than a coincidence. Perhaps it’s a commentary of sorts on how we experience journalism these days and the ways in which a longform doc can serve as counterpoint to the media barrage that defines our current age.
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