True / False Film Festival 2025

It's that time of year again (last weekend in February/first weekend in March) where Columbia, Missouri hosts one of the largest documentary film festivals in the world. Sal and I have been going every year since 2010. It started as a sort of cheap Christmas present when we were dead broke and just turned into a tradition. (The festival remains impressively affordable) 

There's an atmosphere I appreciate at True/False. A sort of optimism that community isn't dead. Here we all are, in person, to watch documentaries. 

Many years there seems to be a soft theme. Films take time to make, so the headlines from 2-3 years ago usually have a few films coming out trying to make sense of everything. This year, the soft theme seemed to be protest. 

I saw seven films this year. In order of my least favorite (still great) to my favorite. 

Where There's Smoke, There's Fire

I don't know about everyone else, but I'm struggling right now. It's beginning to feel a lot of like 2019 again. Everything has such a sense of despair and I'm having a hard time finding brightness through the smoke. 

The real world is a cold and unforgiving place, it usually is, but is especially right now. 

And then you have all the stuff (broadly gestures to the world) going on right now. The new administration has stopped Medicaid (hopefully temporarily), food prices are going up because of the bird flu, we have fires in California, snow in the swamps where alligators are turning to ice cubes, airline disasters likely caused by an understaffed air safety team, governmental chaos, where we have officials (including the president) trying to spin DEI as the culprit. 

If feels like we're in the throes of the death of an empire. At the very least, the throes of some cover band mashing REM's "End of the World" and Billy's Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" into a ham-fisted commentary likely sponsored by Pepsi.