As I said in my last post, I’m attending the True/False Film Festival in Columbia, Missouri this weekend. The fest has become one of the foremost documentary festivals, having an impressive mix of titles coming out of Sundance, early stops for films headed to the fall festivals, and its own set of world premieres and off-the-beaten-track docs. While the festival started on Thursday afternoon, I got started on Friday attending a panel discussion on film criticism. I then got to see the following three movies:

Natalia (2023, Elizabeth Mirzaei): My favorite of the first day. Victoria, who admittedly “loves men,” aches for motherhood, and has an engineering degree, has spent the last six years in a Byzantine Catholic monastic community. Now Sister Natalia, she has reached that point in her life to make the final decision to embrace the calling to the religious life or to return to the more worldly form of faithfulness in marriage and motherhood. Mirsaei, shooting in the U.S. for the first time, uses black and white and a 4:3 screen ratio to focus tightly on Sister Natalia and the internal process that she is working through. Those choices are visually stunning, a fitting framing for a subject so compelling as Natalia. She opens herself up to the camera and to us as she contemplates what she would be giving up by choosing the monastic life of service to Christ…or by choosing to leave it. The film affords not only its main subject, but the entire pursuit of faith through such a vocational call, with a dignity the world (as we see through some of the responses to Natalia’s choice) continues to strip away from it. Visually, narratively, and thematically beautiful.

Forms of Forgetting (2023, Burak Çevik): This Turkish film, which had its world premiere at the recent Berlin Film Festival, was quite a bit more experimental. The director had two actors, who used to be a couple, reflect on their relationship–including having the 2022 version of themselves watch the 2020 versions of themselves talk about the same subject. The focus is on how they remember–or, more explicitly, forget–parts of their experiences. From that conversation, Çevik engages in a mediation on the different ways things are forgotten: from something as esoteric as the processing of metal for construction where the original form of the ore ceases to exist, to something as viscerally tragic as 19th-century slave prison where the lives are forgotten, buried in mass graves. More a filmed reflection than a documentary, Forms is the kind of film that challenges your assumptions about what film can be.

Going Varsity in Mariachi (2023, Sam Osborn and Alejandra Vasquez): High school sports team strives all year for the big competition. That’s not at all original. Neither are the beats of the individual stories: the high achiever wants to finish strong; the gay girl finds a girlfriend, the ne’er-do-well struggles to avoid letting the team down, the poor kid needs the scholarship. But the setting here is quite different; more than 100 Texas schools compete each year in competitive mariachi. That twist adds the novelty—and the truly endearing kids add the fun—so that it doesn’t just feel like somewhere you’ve been before. Plus, a festival screening was the perfect setting, with lots of crowd reactions and applause and a long standing ovation for the directors and two of the young cast members.

(Photo credit: Osmosis Films)