For the past week, I have been wearing my black True/False hoodie as if it is a badge; the symbol of a movement. Yet I’ve avoided blogging my festival recap. Why? Well, here’s an anecdote. A very recent anecdote. This evening, I taught my NYU class, “Contemporary Documentary.” Just to shake things up again, I showed my class, who are relatively new to documentaries, Chris Marker’s brilliant “SANS SOLEIL.” When I turned on the lights, they looked as if they just performed triple bypass surgery. I have never seen anything like it! SANS SOLEIL, which I have seen multiple times, is a singular cinematic essay that explores time, memory, represention, colonialism, commodification, politics, mediation, Hitchcock, seasons, cats, classical music, revolutionary spirit, the failures of the Sixties, and much much more, essentially creating a new cinematic language. It is a film with which I have long been obsessed, writing an epic paper structured like the film itself – the Vertigo-ian spiral of time. (As Madeline, our Proustian-named heroine says, pointing to the rings on a sequoia tree, “Here I was born, and here I died.”) But, I digress. (As usual).

The point being that, quite frankly, I was shell-shocked by True/False. Unable to, like the students in my class, immediately process the amazing things I had just seen, and relationships I had made. In a book about Chris Marker, Catherine Upton writes that he believes in cinema’s power to “unveil deeper realities that expand and enrich the significance of the everyday world, but remain firmly grounded in its objects and appearances.” In short, cinema’s power of revelation. The revelations of True/False were multiple, and every moment was like that perfect image of happiness that Marker uses in both La Jetee and Sans Soleil, the one we are not aware is happiness distilled until we are in the future, pondering the past. I’m waxing philosophical, I know. Teaching at a college level – read: pretentious – does that to me.

True/False really was about this new recognition of the power of nonfiction, as well as the recognition that there is no such thing AS nonfiction. These artists whose films I saw this weekend — Margaret Brown (THE ORDER OF MYTHS is her wonderful exploration of racial segregation and ritual in the American South); Nanette Burnstein (AMERICAN TEEN is an intensely crafted film that captures the truth of teenage life in midwest America); Cynthia Lester (MY MOTHER’S GARDEN explores the filmmaker’s mother’s hoarding disorder and mental illness with a sense of the beauty of difference and unconditional love); Daniel Robin (MY OLYMPIC SUMMER delves into the filmmaker’s collapsed marriage through the lens of his mother’s existential angst); Anna Browlnowski (FORBIDDEN LIES is an absolutely phenomenal film about a bestselling author/pathological liar that works on so many levels and shifts direction unexpectedly so many times I was utterly captivated); and James Marsh (MAN ON WIRE, about the World Trade Center tightrope walk of Philippe Petit, is about such a huge amount more that the audience was collectively moved to tears) — all capture a larger truth through their own lenses, their Cinema Eyes. I have not felt this moved since I attended the Flaherty Film Seminar four years ago. There was a feeling of collective energy and frenzy, of the spirit of everyone there supporting the same ideas. Sitting every day at the new Ragtag Cinema (festival HQ, which True/False co-founders David Wilson and Paul Sturtz also, ummm, co-founded), editing the Cinema Eye Yearbook with Pamela Cohn and AJ Schnack, I watched as friends like Shooting People’s Ingrid Kopp, journalist Ray Pride, filmmakers Ashley Sabin and David Redmon (KAMP KATRINA and the upcoming INTIMIDAD), darling blogger Joel Heller (DOCS THAT INSPIRE), and numerous others hunched over laptops, working our collective asses off to usher in this new movement. This, as well as the shared inspiration of all the friends, new and old (watch out — here come the shout-outs) who I communed with in the quaintness of Columbia, Missouri (new best friend/star of my Big Sky recap Brian Liu, I THINK WE’RE ALONE NOW director Sean Donnelly, Jordan duh!, Docurama’s Liz Ogilvie, Indiewire’s Eugene Hernandez, the kick-ass Brent Hoff of Wholphin, SALIM BABA producer-cinematographer Francisco Bello, AOL True Stories’ Andrew Mer, fellow Indiepixer Jason Tyrrell , Greg from Balcony Releasing, my favorite documentary composer Ionic Furjanic of MANDA BALA and JESUS CAMP, and numerous others that I am forgetting of course, felt as if we were all riding one collective wave. Or so I’d like to think. And to have my soulmate — my twin sister Alana — there to experience with me, made the whole weekend as perfect as perfection can be. Which is, perfection squared and distilled. I have more to post about True/False. But for now, like my students, I need to process (and sleep.) Chris Marker’s narrator says, “the significance of the image only became apparent to the man years later.” To me, the significance of True/False took just a couple of days to become apparent. David Wilson and Paul Sturtz, you bold and foolish lambs, I salute you for that.