Five Points of View on the True/False Film Festival
…well, more like ten…
POV# 2: Feral Foster, a solo musician from New York City, sings to the audience of "Identity Crisis" before the movie begins on Sunday, Feb. 28, 2010 at the Tiger Hotel in Columbia, Mo.
Background…
Last weekend, Columbia hosted the True/False, an annual film festival for documentaries. The streets bustled in a way not often seen in this part of the country; a friend of mine, Mito Habe-Evans, commented that it felt like we were in a “real” city.
All weekend I walked in a circuit through downtown Columbia, from the Missouri Theatre to RagTag Cinema across Broadway and down to the Tiger Hotel, intermittently weaving through the middle of my route just to mix things up. There were times that it seemed the petitioners were in equally strong force as the movie-goers….who were mostly from out of town.
The restaurants were packed, and the trash cans on the street swelled and became domed with all of the trash that people couldn’t fit inside. But for all of the visual variety in front of me, it became difficult to find a narrative that would “work” for a coherent essay about the event. There were lots of singles to be had–indeed, some of them have made it onto this blog already–but finding a thread was difficult.
After editing my take five different times, I found that there were two threads I could pursue: one of the experience of the film festival for movie-goers, and the other the experience of volunteers.
These are the images I have selected to tell the story of the spectator’s experience at the film festival:
More photos and commentary after the jump! Read the rest of this entry »
