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After the Storm: Scenes from True/False 2015

Michaela Tucker

True/False festivalgoers headed home after the close of the four-day event on Sunday night. The 12th annual documentary festival featured old favorites like the March March parade and original music alongside a new selection of over 40 films.
 
This year, the festival adjusted to the temporary loss of Jesse Hall and screened films in smaller venues across the University of Missouri’s campus and to digital projection for all the films. 

 
True/False volunteer Ellie Busch said she keeps coming back because of the festival’s atmosphere.
 
“I don’t know how to describe it, it’s just really fun,” Busch said. 
 
Festival attendees flooded the streets of downtown Columbia and enjoyed the warm weather in between screenings and performances. On Saturday, Gabriel Williams led a group on a tour of the temporary art installations throughout the district.
 
He encouraged people on the tour to put their own imagination into the art.
 
“This is one of the new ones that got built this year,” Williams said. “It’s by an artist named Duncan Bindbeutel. He discovered this mysterious figure in a block of ice and dragged it down here from Chicago. The idea behind it was to put it out in the pocket park where we’re standing and let it gradually melt over the course of the festival.”
 
Williams encouraged the attendees to touch and interact with the sculpture.
 
Later on, the tour passed Davey B. Gravey’s Tiny Cinema, another installation piece. Inside his trailer, there is a four-seat theatre. Gravey gave each of his short documentaries a live soundtrack.  
 
“It’s a very unique and immediate experience and no two performances are alike,” Williams said. 
 
Hannah and Delia Rainey were musicians for the first time at this year’s True/False. They said playing before films was good exposure for their band Dubb Nubb.
“It’s cool for us to have new audience, new fans. It’s cool for them to be able to see a band that they would never have heard about before,” Delia Rainey said. 
 
Mini Chu has attended the festival for four years and said the films are what keeps her coming back, but she said True/False isn’t like any other film festival.
“Here it’s sort of like the whole community’s involved,” Chu said. “It’s fun in a way that it’s not at other film festivals.”
 
Now, Columbia streets return to normal and True/False fans begin the wait for the festival to return. 
 

Michaela Tucker is a Minneapolis native currently studying broadcast journalism at the University of Missouri. She is also a co-founder of KBIA’s partner program Making Waves, a youth radio initiative that empowers Columbia Public Schools students to share their stories.
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