The 23rd annual True/False film festival in Columbia, MO has reached its midway point, with one of documentary’s most revered talents presiding as Visiting Artistic Director – Oscar nominee Yance Ford.
For the filmmaker known for Strong Island and Power, it marks a return to programming after his work at the PBS series POV in the aughts, where Ford screened submissions and oversaw POV’s open call.
“I was excited by the prospect of jumping back into programming, which is something it turns out that I love to do still,” Ford says of the True/False position. “And it’s been a great experience.”
Ragtag Film Society
True/False, a program of the Ragtag Film Society, is unveiling a remarkable number of world premieres by the standards of a regional festival.
“This programming team, this festival takes premieres really seriously. [Audiences], yes, they’re interested in the films that come out of Sundance with a lot of buzz… But I also think people are interested in new material,” Ford tells Deadline. “They’re really interested in seeing first-time filmmakers, filmmakers who haven’t made a film in a long time… The thing that people have been excited about this year with 10 world premieres in the features category and 11 world premieres in the shorts is that they are going to be the first people to see these things.”
‘Broken English’
Rustic Canyon Pictures
Ford cites consequential films up and down the True/False lineup. “It’s not a lie to say that I’m excited about everything in the program. But there are films that I’m especially excited to see how audiences respond to,” he says. “Remake [dir. Ross McElwee] and The Bend in the River [dir. Rob Moss], just two iconic filmmakers at the top of their form. I’m really excited about Broken English. Broken English is f***ing amazing… It is genre-expanding in the way that I hope we continue to see filmmakers do. And I just find it incredibly exciting. It’s thrilling to watch.”
L-R ‘The Great Experiment’ producer Farihah Zaman, director Stephen Maing, director Eric Daniel Metzgar, and True/False Visiting Artistic Director Yance Ford participate in a Q&A following the film’s world premiere.
Matthew Carey
Among world premieres, Ford notes The Great Experiment, directed by Stephen Maing and Eric Daniel Metzgar, a film that offers “a kaleidoscopic portrait of America during one of the most volatile eras in the nation’s history,” according to the festival program. It was primarily shot between 2017-2020, though it includes footage captured at the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021.
“I have really looked at The Great Experiment as like, ‘Oh, that’s how we got here.’ And we need that help, we need that hindsight,” Ford insists. “I haven’t seen something as distilled — and without the kind of commentary that might push people away from the film — about this political moment. And I think that The Great Experiment does that.”
‘Phenomena’
Sandbox Films/Screen Australia
Ford highlights another world premiere – Phenomena, directed by Australian filmmaker Josef Gatti.
“The easiest way to describe it is that it’s a film about how you visualize sound, how you can see sound,” Ford explains. “We did the tech check for it this afternoon and it’s got a lot of bass in the mix. And so it’s not just the kind of film that you see, it’s the kind of film that you feel in that great kind of vibrational, like really deep bass way. And I think people are going to love that.”
Ford calls TCB – The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing, directed by Monica Henriquez and Louis Massiah, “amazing… Louis Massiah isn’t somebody who’s gotten a lot of festival play over the decades and he’s been a stalwart director. He did episodes of Eyes on the Prize and he’s just like an O.G. In certain circles, [writer-filmmaker-activist Toni Cade Bambara] is well known, but sort of outside of those circles, she’s largely unknown. And it really felt like this incredible meeting of these two — an under-heralded filmmaker with this under-appreciated, at least in this moment, author.”
Among other standouts for Ford: “People have been really responding to Nuisance Bear, Bucks Harbor, and Soul Patrol. These are the things that are sold out or that have come from Sundance with a lot of buzz.”
Shortly before True/False began, the Ragtag Film Society announced the appointment of Farihah Zaman as the festival’s new artistic director, a selection Ford praises as “an outstanding choice.”
‘Power’
Netflix
As for Ford’s plans after True/False, the filmmaker reveals he’s at work on a new project, but says it’s too soon to make any disclosures about it. His most recent film, Power, examined the history of policing in the U.S. and the use of police power to maintain and enforce “a particular social order, one that privileges property-owning members of society while targeting and disadvantaging others,” as we wrote in May 2024.
Recent ICE raids that have left multiple people dead in Minneapolis and elsewhere must be understood in the context of this system of control, Ford argues.
“Power is the blueprint for what is happening right now. Power takes us back to the Spanish American war when we used our military to put down domestic insurgencies in places like the Philippines. We perfected those tactics, we brought them back, and we deployed them on the streets of American cities,” he says. Regarding ICE, Ford observes, “It’s really important for people to remember that federal agents are not police officers. They’re a different class of law enforcement, but the president has succeeded in creating a federal police department. Essentially for all intents and purposes, it’s a presidential police force and it ought to scare the living daylights out of anybody who knows the history of politicians who had their own police forces to deploy. It hasn’t really ended well.”
Yance Ford and Amanda Lichtenberg attend the 90th Annual Academy Awards on March 4, 2018.
Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
In 2018, Ford became the firstly openly trans person nominated for an Academy Award, for Strong Island. He has seen trans rights at the state and federal level take a huge step backward since Pres. Trump was reelected in 2024. To note just one example, the Republican-led state legislature in Kansas passed a law last month that summarily “invalidated driver’s licenses and birth certificates for anyone who had changed the gender markers on their IDs from their birth sex,” according to the Washington Post.
“There are states that are deputizing their citizens to confront, for a reward, the identification and the turning in of a transgender person. Like, your body is the wrong body in the wrong space,” Ford comments. “It has so much in common with the Fugitive Slave Act, because at the base of these trans bounty hunter laws is the assertion that you and your body are out of place. You’re out of time, you’re out of place, you need to be removed because you are a danger. It’s amazing how you pull this thread and it just keeps going.”
Ford continues, “I’m not scared. I’m angry. That’s the thing. And folks who are pushing these kinds of bills and saying that drivers in Kansas have to immediately turn in their driver’s licenses if they don’t reflect your gender at birth, it’s like you have nothing better to do in your state than to go after one 10th of 1 percent of the population. History’s going to really look back on you and it’s going to put a gold star right next to your name for that.”