True/False 2020: On Ecstasy & Eccentricity
THIS MARCH, before the full force of COVID-19 hit, the documentary community flocked to Missouri’s True/False Film Festival (T/F) to be immersed in other realities. We feigned fist bumps before going in for inevitable and enthusiastic embraces, 15,000 documentary lovers, thrilled to be converging yet again at the “funnest festival.” We had no real sense that this would be the last event we would attend together for the foreseeable future.
As the last documentary festival to operate with relative normalcy, in the before times of the pandemic, T/F 2020 glows with an afterimage of what festivals represented to us all. It also lingers, ghostly, in an incantation of what might be ahead for festivals in years to come.
Many of us had come to Missouri with great expectations: T/F was in a landmark year, with a new constellation of programmers, operating for the first time outside the vision of the festival founders. Now that we are in a time of massive rupture and reimagining, what might be left of these expectations on the other side of this global freefall?
An afterimage is the glow left behind once an image has passed. It is demarcated by contrasts and is most potent when the original image was especially vivid. True/False’s colourful rebuttal to conventions has left a lasting impression on our collective vision of what a festival might be, and what forms documentary might take, especially in North America. Founded in 2004 by
