This article appeared in the March 14, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Valentina and the MUOSters (Francesca Scalisi, 2024)

When it comes to hyping their home state, Missourians tend to be a bit like cowboys stretched around the campfire, one-upping each other with brag talk. The longtime New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin once claimed that Winsteads, the beloved hamburger joint of his Kansas City childhood, served the best in the world, full stop. St. Louisans like myself would disagree with Trillin, bestowing that honor upon our city’s Carl’s Drive-In and the sublimely crispy patties it doles out, but would not dispute his broader point—that the world’s best is most definitely to be found in-state. So please forgive my bluster if I’m tempted to hurl similarly wild superlatives at this year’s True/False, the Show Me State–based festival devoted to nonfiction film that just wrapped its 21st edition in the charming college-town environs of Columbia.

At a moment when filmmakers, critics, and audiences alike are increasingly questioning the artistic value, financial sustainability, and political efficacy of the film festival, it’s refreshing to attend one that seems almost exclusively devoted to its filmmakers, as well as its local audiences (friends who live in Columbia cite the festival’s existence as a major factor in their decision to keep living there). Before screenings, programmers saunter up to the mic to thank sponsors like the neighborhood coffee shop, the local and international musicians (“buskers,” per fest parlance) who perform in the theaters while audiences find their seats, and the festival’s more than 500 volunteers—a far cry from the litany of multinational corporations, luxury fashion brands, and ultra-wealthy donors cited at larger, more prestige-laden fests. Indeed, there are no Chase Sapphire Lounges in Columbia for VIP patrons; instead, attendees crate-dig in between screenings at the excellently stocked and modestly priced Hitt Records, or knock back $3 tallboys of local-favorite Stag beer at Uprise, the laid-back bakery and bar attached to the festival’s flagship Ragtag Cinema.

Last year, True/False was one of the most high-profile festivals to issue a statement in support of Palestinian liberation. At this year’s edition, I noted several volunteers, including the shuttle driver who transported journalists from the Holiday Inn into town, proudly donning keffiyehs on top of their purple True/False T-shirts. Small gestures like these might seem merely symbolic, but it’s worth noting how very real the stakes are inside the state where True/False takes place. When the festival was founded in 2004, Missourians still defined themselves politically by a kind of sensible Midwesternness—an attitude exemplified by the oft-touted fact that in every Presidential election from 1960 to 2004, Missouri had backed the winning candidate, whether they be a Democrat or a Republican. In the last two decades, though, the state has swung to the right, as Republican lawmakers have consolidated power in the rural counties that make up most of the region, leaving increasingly hollowed-out cities like St. Louis, Kansas City, and Columbia as isolated little blue splotches in a sea of red.

In 2025, Columbia stands as a political hot spot: the first legal abortion in Missouri since 2018 took place the day after the festival wrapped, but right-wing lawmakers are already fighting back; members of the University of Missouri chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine were subject to a smear campaign manufactured by various Republican groups; and USAID cuts have led to layoffs for countless agricultural workers in the region. Living in the state can at times feel bleak, and perhaps that’s where the Missourian’s almost compulsive need to wax poetic about their home comes from—a desire to convince others that the place represents more than just flyover country or a continuously updating record of our country’s latest and worst ills. Perhaps, too, when out-of-state visitors find True/False so suffused with a certain joyous brand of Midwestern hospitality, they are in fact enjoying the modest fruits of a hard-won, and always threatened, victory.

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The theme of this year’s festival, spearheaded by the leadership team of Chloé Traynor, Emily Edwards, and Grace Piontek, was “All the Time,” and several of the 12 features and six shorts I caught over the long weekend were indeed preoccupied with the ways in which their subjects carry the past with them into the present—through sometimes-public, sometimes-private rituals of mourning, working, cooking, playing music, and sharing family or community histories. In Brittany Shyne’s arrestingly photographed Seeds, Black farmers in Mississippi (many of whom own “centennial farms”—i.e., farms owned and operated by the same family for over 100 years, with some dating back to 1865) must contend not only with house-shaking rainstorms and runaway cows, but also a blatantly racist dearth of federal grants from the Biden administration—a willful blind eye that could, the film makes heartbreakingly clear, spell the end of a way of life. Yehui Zhao’s debut feature May the Soil Be Everywhere spins the filmmaker’s fascination with the balcony garden of her grandmother’s apartment into a zigzagging and playful road movie of sorts, culminating with multiple generations of Zhao’s family traveling to her grandma’s now-abandoned childhood home in north-central China’s Loess Plateau to harvest imaginary fruits from trees long gone.

The most remarkable of what I’ll call these “people in the landscape” films, and perhaps the standout selection of the entire festival, was Chinese filmmaker Hu Sanshou’s Resurrection. Set in Hu’s mountainside hometown in the northern province of Shanxi and made without any real budget to speak of, the film initially begins by documenting, with long and painterly wide shots, the construction of a new highway that cuts through the town. Only after several minutes of witnessing the slow onslaught of cranes and bulldozers do we start to see the human toll of this project: villagers begin sledgehammering the tombs of their departed family members; what’s left of their remains must be relocated to avoid being paved over. Proceeding at times with the logic of an avant-garde structural film, the ensuing scenes of excavation and reburial follow a repeating pattern, as community members (mostly middle-aged men, many of whom seem to be perpetual cigarette smokers) work together to pull bones out of the earth and reconstitute what’s left.

While grimly matter-of-fact, Hu’s observational style also allows at times for deadpan gallows humor: in one scene, a man pulls up a clip-art rendering of a human skeleton on his smartphone as he huddles over the jumble of bones spread out before him, apparently at a loss for the right way to put things back together; in another, someone calls out “I’ve got a leg!” from inside a hole in the ground, only to hear a response fired right back: “We’ve already got enough of those!” Other moments feel viscerally wrong or taboo to watch, like when a worker forcefully pulls layers of straw and mud directly through the eye socket of a skull, or when a bulldozer razes a burial ground with such blind disinterest that a woman’s off-screen voice pleads, “Our ancestors, please don’t blame us. We got no other options.” Title cards that Hu places at the end of each exhumation sequence give the film a unique poetic tone. The screen fades to black, as the disembodied voices of family members and villagers share clipped, unsparing memories of the person we’ve just seen excavated and an india-ink portrait of the deceased’s visage, made by Hu himself, slowly comes to life through a time-lapse fade. Ultimately, they form a kind of composite view of the upheavals of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution—all from the grounded perspective of these wayward lives cut tragically short.

Maxime Jean-Baptiste’s Kouté vwa (Listen to the Voices) is a film awash in shimmering shades of blue, moving to its own delicately undulating rhythms while spinning a story of collective resolve. Imbued with a warm intimacy and shot with a patiently hovering camera, the docufictional film centers on the 13-year-old Melrick, who lives in France but is spending the better part of his summer vacation visiting his grandmother Nicole in French Guiana. Melrick mostly passes his days with carefree abandon—cruising around on his bike, cooking dinner and trading jokes with Nicole, playing parking-lot soccer under the glow of street lamps—but, as the movie progresses, he gradually becomes more aware of the deep trauma that his family and their neighbors carry with them, stemming from the murder of Melrick’s uncle (and Nicole’s son) Lucas over a decade ago when Melrick was just 2. As Melrick’s conversations with Nicole and Yannick, his uncle’s childhood best friend, start to probe into their still-open wounds, he also begins rehearsing with Mayouri Tchô Nèg, the brass and drumline group that Lucas once played with, who are planning a memorial concert to honor the anniversary of his passing. The film’s climatic musical performance, expertly sound-mixed and positively vibrating with tenderness, becomes both Melrick’s initiation into adulthood and a rousing portrait of resilience and collective action in the streets.

A late-night screening of Francesca Scalisi’s Valentina and the MUOSters proved to be one of the true pleasures of my festival experience. Like Kouté vwa, the film is a tenderhearted coming-of-age story that slowly unspools its broader themes through a close-to-the-ground examination of family, place, and solidarity. But the protagonist here is a grown-up: 26-year-old Valentina, who crochets colorful flowers and floats in a small, above-ground pool in her remote corner of Sicily. Valentina still lives with her charmingly quirky but controlling parents, and the codependent trio tend to their modest but light-dappled abode, watering a teeming succulent garden and dining alfresco on home-cooked meals, all while constantly bickering with each other. Their daily lives, however, are increasingly affected by the American military base that has recently been installed nearby. Ominous MUOS (Mobile User Objective System) satellites emit electromagnetic radiation that slowly poisons Valentina’s father and throws his pacemaker out of whack, while a forest fire caused by the MUOS burns a beloved tree from Valentina’s childhood. Enraged, she springs into action and joins a protest where demonstrators loudly chant, “From Sicily to Palestine, one voice: murderous America.” Watching the film in Missouri, I couldn’t help but think of this chant’s parallel cousin—“From Ferguson to Palestine, occupation is a crime”—and found myself marveling at this quiet film’s long echoes.

During the Q&A for Valentina and the MUOSters, a True/False screener mentioned that she’d fallen in love with the film after discovering it amongst the 50 features she’d been tasked with viewing from the festival’s general-submissions pile, and had proceeded to proselytize its merits relentlessly to the other programmers. Scalisi, for her part, seemed most concerned with getting the small audience at the Willy Wilson theater to exclaim “Ciao, Valentina!” for a video she hoped to send back to her film’s protagonist in Sicily, to show her the impact of her work halfway across the world. When the film finally let out, it was past midnight, and Uprise had transformed into an impromptu dance floor as jacked-up college kids danced to early-’90s hip-hop. The next day, I ate the best burger in the world at Booches Billiard Hall in Columbia, Missouri.