Rat Film (2017) Streaming

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An international center for the preservation, study, and exhibition of film and video with a particular focus on American independent and avant-garde cinema and its.

True/False Film Festival 2. For four days, the town of Columbia, Missouri becomes the hub of creative non- fiction, a place where artists, citizens, and everyone in between gather to share in exciting new visions from around the globe. Without a strong industry presence, True/False primarily exists as a sanctuary from the more economically perverse elements of the film medium, a place for exposure, experience, and enlightenment. To call it a “utopia” would be more than a little hyperbolic, but to this outsider, it’s like a haven for people desperate to avoid the pressures of the outside world while simultaneously gaining perspective on that world as well.

A recap of the 2017 True/False Film Festival. Watch Another Evil (2017) Free Online there.

In other words, it’s a laboratory where the burden is on understanding and less on competition or even achievement. Advertisement. It would be remiss of me not to mention the particulars of Columbia itself since it’s the type of environment where something as special as True/False can flourish. Though my alma mater was technically located in a town, it was more of a small village that primarily existed as a small appendage of the actual college, at least from the perspective of the students. In contrast, Columbia is a “college town” in every sense of the phrase: easily navigable and filled with the usual signifiers—coffee shops, bars, eateries, a seemingly endless coterie of distractions from the pressures of the university despite its small geographical size. Yet it brims with ineffable integrity; it feels familiar, very much the mental picture of a college town without the typical East Coast connotations, but entirely unique at the same time. As such, there’s a higher education bent to the whole affair that cannot and shouldn’t be ignored.

Yes, it’s still technically a film festival, complete with all the characteristic attributes of such an event, but True/False feels more like an extended collegial exchange. That’s partially because the “conversation” continues long after the films and Q& As are over, well into the night at various social functions around town. However, it also seems to be the very nature of the festival to provoke thought without being blandly “thought provoking,” similar to how the best classes in college would keep kids awake at all hours discussing the material.

The purveyors of the festival are of similar mind but with few overlapping perspectives making it an ideal place for this level of engagement. I saw 1. 0 films at the festival, and though my personal opinions on them obviously vary, the movies all basically stayed with me, a rare feat to say the least. None of them scanned as impersonal, and while I will continue to kick myself for missing a couple key titles due to timing mishaps on my part—mainly Guido Hendrikx’s “Stranger in Paradise” and Dmitrii Kalashnikov’s “The Road Movie”—I don’t regret any of the films I chose to see. It’s a testament to the festival’s programming, courtesy of Chris Boeckmann and Abby Sun, that this is the case. Let’s break them down, shall we?

Advertisement. I began and ended the festival with two observational portraits: Viktor Jakovleski’s “Brimstone & Glory,” about an annual fireworks festival in Tultepec, Mexico, and Sompot Chidgasornpongse’s “Railway Sleepers,” about the lives of the myriad people who ride the Thai railway system. The two films complement each other quite well: The former features a dazzling display of light and sound while the latter luxuriates in the quiet, contemplative moments too rarely seen on screen. The film is less successful when it sentimentally leans on its actors, specifically a small child that Jakovleski follows through the event and the days leading up to it, and Dan Romer and Benh Zeitlin’s heavy- handed score that needlessly tries too hard to communicate an otherwise banal conception of “beauty.” The actual presentation of the fireworks in the second half features some remarkable shots, especially in the “Burning of the Bulls” section in which big paper bulls are lit on fire, but even at a brisk 6. Railway Sleepers” fares better mostly because Sompot maintains a muted, pensive tone as he surveys the numerous figures that pass through the rails.

Shot over the course of eight years but constructed to simulate a two- day journey, Sompot captures small conversations between schoolchildren, tourists, food sellers, etc. Easily the weakest film I saw at the festival, “The Cage Fighter” follows 4. MMA fighter Joe Carman as he struggles to eek out one more match while balancing the pressures of his family, the two of which are obviously incompatible. Unay approaches the subject matter in the most “Rocky”- esque way, complete with the requisite clich. Though it features a few winning scenes, particularly near the beginning when we know little about Joe and it isn’t clear where exactly the film is headed, “The Cage Fighter” touches too many of the sports film hazards to rise above the middle of the road.

Advertisement. Editor Brian Tallerico already covered “Quest” when it premiered at Sundance, so I won’t spend too much time on it, but suffice it to say that Olshefski’s film is a captivating, moving portrait of a family desperate to hold on to their community, stay strong amidst political strife, and contend with the traumas and tragedies that occur in America. I’ll point out two things that particularly impressed me: First, Olshefski’s staunch refusal to define both the Rainey family and their North Philadelphia community purely through pain, instead offering numerous moving scenes of intimacy and togetherness in the neighborhood; and second, his resistance to overlay any sort of ham- fisted dramatic arc, political or otherwise, over the family through the eight years of the Obama administration, preferring just to follow them as they age and mature without the burden of a cosine graph narrative structure. Yance Ford’s “Strong Island” and Travis Wilkerson’s theatrical performance piece “Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?” are the two most directly in conversation with each other at the festival. Both deal with the directors' racially motivated murders in the family history, but from opposite sides of the color divide: “Strong Island” follows Ford’s inquiry into the death of his brother in 1. Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?” follows Wilkerson’s interrogation into his great- grandfather’s cold- blooded murder of a black man in Dothan, Alabama as well as the disturbing history of racism that still enervates within his family.“Strong Island” certainly presents an affecting story; Ford, his family, and the key participants in the tragedy offer compelling insights into the human effects of institutional racism as well as long- term familial grief, not to mention the all- too- common miscarriage of justice when it comes to the deaths of unarmed black men. However, the film is too structurally amorphous to pack the punch that it theoretically should. Ford jumps around between the murder, the family’s history in Long Island, the personal story of his brother’s life, and by the end, there are just one too many disjointed narrative strands that needlessly complicate an already messy tale.

The lack of cohesion coupled with certain formal conceits, such as extreme close- ups and frequent theatrical blackouts, render this a film that strains too frequently for meaning, especially when the bare- bones story is already arresting on its own. Advertisement. With “Did You Wonder Who Fired the Gun?,” Wilkerson takes us on a journey through the most nefarious parts of his family history, peeling back layers and layers of ugly, virulent racism that run from the early 2. It’s undeniably powerful to witness Wilkerson’s palpable shame and rage on stage as he documents his journey into the depths of his own heritage, excoriating his bloodline and expressing guilt at his family’s actions.