TRUE/FALSE Film Festival 2025 Overview – Diane Carson reports
Begun in 2004, the 2025 True/False Film Festival in Columbia, Missouri, offered its always impressive international selection of documentaries championing (per the T/F mission) “the challenge of interpreting reality on screen with playfulness, sensitivity, discipline, and daring imagination.” This year’s 30 new features and 24 shorts represented an educational, inspirational, and entertaining treasure trove of international films anchored in historical and personal experiences. A bonus of the True/False Festival is the attendance of directors and/or producers and sometimes subjects, with post-screening Q&As that add background information and update the films’ content.
Of the fifteen films I felt fortunate to see, exploration of the past emerged as a significant theme, perhaps unsurprisingly given the world’s varied crises. Throughout analytical, extraordinary stories, directors consistently emphasized the critical importance of informing the present by incorporating lessons and insights from previously challenging as well as uplifting events. Along those lines, in May the Soil Be Everywhere, New York based, Chinese born director Yehui Zhao returns to her roots, reuniting with her unflappable grandmother. Sharing meals and chores, watching her grandmother embroider colorful shoe sole inserts, Zhao learns about four generations of her family. They include her great-grandparents who, during the 1960s’ Great Leap Forward and the subsequent Cultural Revolution, retreated from their Xi Jiao Gou village to self-built caves in the Loess Plateau, the mountainous area of China’s Shanxi province. Zhao involves family members and viewers as she searches for the original village and excavates the family’s rugged caves. Her wonderful journey opens doors to her heritage, encouraging everyone to embrace such knowledge.
In a similar way, Marjan Khosravi’s Requiem for a Tribe poignantly evokes, as it mourns, the passing of a nomadic woman’s lifestyle. In southwestern Iran, feisty, 55-year-old Hajar Faramarzi resists pressure to move to a city, knowing certain loneliness will descend upon her. Defying exclusion from her Bakhtiari tribe’s traditional migration of sheep herds and donkeys from winter to spring pastures, Hajar insists she join in the trek, having missed it for 15 years. A stalwart contributor to her family, a source of traditional knowledge and survival strategies, Hajar combats increasing urbanization, climate change, and the betrayal of urban family members. Integrating footage from 40 years ago that accentuates unwelcome changes, Khosravi, a Bakhtiari herself, captures the pain of the physical and emotional loss so movingly accessible in this complex, sympathetic profile.
Eerily analogous, Gabrielle Brady’s The Wolves Always Come at Night immerses viewers in the lives of one Mongolian family of sheepherders in the vast Bayankhongor steppes. A catastrophic sandstorm, economic worries, and the need to educate their four children force relocation to a nearby city that also houses other displaced families, supportive but also overwhelmed by climate and income crises. There, father Daava secures work at a construction site while mother Zaya manages the ger. Haunted by the love of his best stallion (depicted in haunting visuals), Daava yearns to reclaim his traditional existence.
In yet another wistful film, Land with No Rider, Tamar Lando unobtrusively listens to four ranchers in their eighties as they thoughtfully reflect on their ranch lives in the high desert of southwestern New Mexico’s Mimbres River Valley. The men aid cows giving birth, fly fish, reminisce, sing along with the radio, visit a bar, and tend, brand, and rescue trapped cattle, all guided by their calmly philosophical acceptance of trials and tribulations, aware that they are a passing generation. Poetic, endearing, and profound, their stories reveal, as Lando described it after the screening, a deep, unsentimental, solemn connection to the land in its breathtaking beauty.
Another film anchored in thought-provoking contemplation, Brittany Shyne’s Seeds, marks a sad yet also heartening interaction with Black farmers struggling to maintain their way of life amidst racist denials of loans and promised government funds withheld. What comes through in every scene is a strong, sustaining sense of community and the vital importance of family. Subtitles would help since some of the conversations are very quiet, but every scene delivers an engaging interaction of love and support for each other. Candid moments of joy in this black-and-white film radiate the feel of cherished memories for the families profiled and, if we’re fortunate, those watching as well.
Grounded in markedly different but equally striking history, directors Maia Lekow and Christopher King follow Kenyan writer Shiro and publisher Wachuka in their dedicated efforts to modernize the derelict British colonial McMillan Library in downtown Nairobi. How to Build a Library details the political morass of legal hurdles, corruption, and political machinations. Nevertheless, the two women persevere, holding fund raisers, interviewing community members, and meeting with library staff. More in-depth assessment of the British legacy, in addition to further examination of the local community, would have enriched these admirably indomitable women’s efforts to establish a valuable, contemporary library, one with books by Black authors who have never heretofore been included. Still, this film sheds an illuminating light on today’s legacy and former struggles.
Also explicitly invoking the past, in contemporary Sarajevo, Ryan Sidhoo’s The Track watches coach Senad Omanović train three teenage athletes on the graffiti strewn, damaged, concrete 1984 Winter Olympics Luge track. Invoking the glory days through archival footage, present-day contrasts are stark though, with courage and commitment, post-war, Bosnia-Herzegovina athletes’ desire persists, an always admirable attribute. The trials and tribulations of these Muslim athletes prove again that underdog sports stories encourage emotional involvement and win hearts, especially when gifted competitors face such discouraging, daunting circumstances. When Mirza Nikolajev, one of the extraordinary athletes profiled, walked out on the Missouri Theatre stage after the screening to a long standing ovation, there were few dry eyes in the house.
Again situating the past within the present, prompted by a dream, in River of Grass Sasha Wortzel interweaves Marjory Stoneman Douglas’ poetic writings (lending the film its title) and her lifetime devotion to the Florida Everglades with a marvelous homage to the current environment. Through a lovely interlacing of stories, Wortzel reads from Douglas’ beautifully descriptive work, adds historical context, and learns from Miccosukee guide and educator Betty Osceola, all the while listening to the landscape, as Wortzel said at the post-screening discussion. Paying homage to this unique area of six ecosystems (there are no other Everglades in the world), plants, animals, and people populate an inviting and endangered region. Gorgeous cinematography enhances film footage of Douglas, a straightforward, entertaining interviewee. Osceola asks the crucial question at the end of the film, asserting that “nature will always win, but will we win with her?”
Another film plunged into the water realm, this one the deepest sea in Eleanor Mortimer’s How Deep Is Your Love. Over a 55-day research trip sponsored by the British Natural History Museum, in the relatively alien central Pacific Ocean, the remotely manipulated underwater robot Isis surveys the 4,700 meter deep abyss as 49 marine biologists photograph and humorously name dazzling new species, their colors and shapes mind boggling. Investigating the taxonomy of the previously undiscovered life forms is at the heart of the research, but precious little scientific content is evaluated or explained. In one brief scene, Greenpeace activists intercept the ship and the threat of deep sea mining is acknowledged in a subsequent scene, with no follow up to or development of serious ethical concerns. The soft voiceover narration does not deliver the insight the content deserves; nevertheless, the glimpse of these remarkable oceanic life forms is thrilling.
A terrific, hard-hitting documentary, Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine’s Middletown is an uplifting crowd pleaser that deserves to be seen by every teacher everywhere. For it validates the exceptional individual and community impact of unconventional Middletown High School teacher Fred Isseks who initiated and taught Electronic English in the 1990s. From 1991 through 1997 in this school 70 miles north of New York, Isseks inspired students, who usually spurned academic study, to pursue a journalistic investigation of the toxic Wallkill local landfill. Facing political resistance and corporate deceit, Isseks and his classes exposed organized crime’s connection with their and many other toxic waste dumps. The class’ tenacious pursuit of the hidden truth culminates in their hour long film Garbage, Gangsters and Greed, all shot on VHS. Fred Isseks and four of his previous students reunite in a mockup LA studio to revisit their experiences. This wonderfully crafted documentary submits a model of civic activism through the empowering leadership of an innovative educator.
Comical moments populated many otherwise serious films and one thoroughly playful entry as well, notably Violet Du Feng’s The Dating Game. A fly on the wall in Chongqing city, she documents three Chinese bachelors (in China single men vastly outnumbering women by 30 million) who struggle to find love and mates. Aided by dating counselor Hao, whose own marriage seems in peril, their encounters are as amusing as they are revealing. At the post-screening Q&A, Feng said she considered it her duty to get the men’s perspective and to challenge her own biases. She succeeds commendably.
While this overview revisits what, in some instances, may seem somber works, I assure readers that the insightful, empathetic, and informative nature of all the documentaries made each a joy to see. There were other films among the 15 I watched that are not considered here. As those documentaries screen or stream over the next few months (and I very much hope they all do), I’ll add to, revisit, and expand my reviews.
