The films I saw on day four of True/False this year were mostly political in one degree or another. Of the five, only one could be said to be apolitical. I suspect that True/False is thought of as a left-leaning festival, perhaps in the spirit of Stephen Colbert's famous pronouncement that "facts have a well-known liberal bias," but I don't think films are picked with that specifically in mind. Columbia is at the center of a very red state, after all.
Some subject matter attracts strong feelings. While it's uncommon for the films at True/False to attract demonstrators, it does happen once in a while. After Tiller, a big hit at Sundance, attracted the inevitable anti-choice demonstrators at True/False. I don't think anybody who lives here is surprised by that. Drive by Planned Parenthood on any given day and you'll see them there, too. They are persistent. For what it's worth, I didn't see After Tiller. I don't know whether or not the people handing out flyers at Pandora's Promise, a pro-nuclear power essay, could be categorized as demonstrators. They didn't have signs and they didn't shout at people, but they did want to make sure that their countervailing point of view was available to everyone entering the theater. I doubt these people share the same ideology as the protestors at After Tiller.
My last day of True/False this year was a frenzy to get as many films under my belt as I could. I think it's only physically possible to see five films on any given day of the festival, and I maxed that on Sunday. The first two films I saw were the aforementioned Pandora's Promise and Who Is Dayani Cristal?, two films that are similar to each other only in so far as they represent broken or unfulfilled promises.
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