The annual True/False Film Festival rolls into my fair city again today with a selection of non-fiction-ish films on offer. I always think of the festival as a kind of circus, given that there's a parade and a bunch of interactive art projects associated with the event. I've seen several of this year's films prior to the start of the festival in my role as screener. Here are my thoughts on those films, all of which make their world premieres tonight.
Phenomena (2026, directed by Josef Gatti) is to physics as Microcosmos was to biology, minus the snail sex. It attempts to visualize physical phenomena for the screen and covers major topics like light, matter, energy, waves, gravity, magnetism, entropy, and life itself. In each case, the film uses a macrocinematic technique to create visual poems from the individual phenomena. The color spectra on the surface of bubbles, produced by the transparency and thickness of the bubble wall create a spectacular light show, for example, that resembles the light shows they used to create with colored oils for psychedelic rock shows at the Fillmore. The self-assembly of matter is demonstrated by the growth of salt crystals, for another example, while waves are produced with a vibrating plate and sand, et cetera. Each movement has a distinct visual key, and the score makes the whole thing play like a physics version of Fantasia.
It also inculcates a sense of curiosity in the natural world. In addition to its function as a beautiful cinematic experience, it explains the universe in an engaging way that leaves open the door to explore further. It also draws a connection from all of these forces to the immediate lives of the viewer. This is especially true of the segment on nuclear forces, in which a piece of uranium is put in a chamber with a gas that reacts to radioactivity, creating visible tendrils of vapor wherever a ray passes through. Then it offers the same visual without the uranium, in the presence of just the air. There are still trails of vapor as particles from the background radiation of the universe manifest themselves. The whole thing is compelling, and makes science and the natural world visible in a way that most science media does not. Even without the science background, this is the work of a keen cinematic intelligence. Often spectacular, this would best be seen on the biggest screen you can find.
Buck's Harbor (2026, directed by Peter Muller) is an examination of male isolation and loneliness by way of a portrait of several men who live in Bucks Harbor, Maine. All of them make their living by lobstering, either directly or indirectly. Each of them cope with the disappointment and bitterness of working a hard-scrabble existence. Dave is a recovering addict who becomes harbor master during the course of the film; he once had aspirations to be an artist. Dave has a nephew who is learning the same life, and while their time together ice fishing and hunting and such seem to offer them meaning, the hard wall of adulthood remains for the nephew to climb. Wayne, another recovering addict, is a nomad who has worked dozens of jobs and spent time in prison; he views his isolation as freedom and has a tattoo of a jailbird who reminds him that alcohol destroyed his life. Mark makes lobster traps and has a life that’s not quite as hard as the men who go to sea each day. He’s married, but he has a second life as a crossdresser who performs an alternate identity on web cam. His crossdressing seems like a pressure valve in which he can burn away the expectations of masculinity and escape them, if only briefly.
This is an observational doc, where the various characters talk about their lives as they go about them. This sometimes looks like The Most Dangerous Catch when it's on the water, though without the notion that it's a grand adventure. At land, there’s a sense here that performing the roles expected of men have basically forestalled all of these people from living a full and meaningful life, and there’s also a sense that the patrimony passed on to the next generation is equally hopeless, with the looming spectre of climate change decimating their livelihood. There are occasional shots of lobsters in their environment sitting as if in judgement, or as a kind of Greek Chorus. This is a bleak film, filled with hollow men and economic desolation. It’s also a beautiful film in its way, capturing the coast of Maine and a dangerous profession with an eye toward a dismal poetry.
Seized (2026, directed by Sharon Liese) presents the woes of a free press in microcosm by focusing on the 2023 seizure of the Marion County Record in Kansas by the city government. The Record has been investigating a dispute between the owner of a local restaurant owner, who continued to retain a liquor license in spite of a drunk driving conviction. Her ex-husband leaked the information to the Record, who were dubious enough of its provenance that they chose not to run it. That didn't stop the police from raiding the paper for evidence of improperly obtained information. The Record stuck to their anonymous source. The star of the film is the record's editor, Eric Meyer, whose mother, Joan, was the owner of the paper. The police raided their home as well as the paper's offices, precipitating Joan Meyer's death a day later. The police also raided the home of Vice Mayor Ruth Herbell. This was international news, causing the entire profession of journalism to circle the wagons to defend the record, and also started the process of kicking over the rocks to find the dirty secrets of cockroaches, particularly Police Chief Cody an restaurateur Kari Newell. Cody, it seems, had a history of harassment at the Kansas City Police Department, leading to his early retirement there.
The film casts its net wider than the raid and the aftermath, which resulted in lawsuits against the city and the dismissal of the Chief of Police. It's also a portrait of small town journalism and it's relationship to the communities they cover. In this case, it conveniently also projects into a broader examination of journalism in the current national political environment. It's not above indulging in archetypes, either. Eric Meyer is the kind of journalist who used to populate movies. There's a sly cut between Meyer smoking a cigarette as the cops haul off his files and a washtub filled with sand and a myriad of cigarette butts. One can imagine him with a battered fedora and a cigarette dangling from his lip as he bangs out copy on an old manual typewriter. Given that he's the editor, he's also reminiscent of Superman's boss, Perry White, and a maybe a little bit of Walter Burns from The Front Page, an unscrupulous operator who will get the story and protect the paper no matter the means. He could easily be a villain, but is spared that by the sheer stupidity of his opponents. One doesn't have to squint very hard to imagine these people in the current (in 2026) presidential administration. The restaurateur, Newell, even has the look of this era's authoritarian Barbies.
In this case, the institution of journalism prevails, but there's the lurking threat of corporate media ever-present in the background of the film. Meyer is a bulwark against that, too, but when he's gone, who will depend independent journalism in Marion, Kansas? Certainly not the intern whose story runs in parallel to the main story. He's eager, but he's not going to stay. How do you keep them down on the farm, and all that?
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