ROSS MCELWEE: CINEMA OF SELF DISCOVERY

1:00 p.m. — 3:00 p.m. \\ Smith Forum

With Ross McElwee

Moderated by Daniel Christian​

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​Ross McElwee is being honored this year at True/False with the True Vision Ward, an apt celebration of his 50 year career as one of our greatest documentarians. All semester, students at the Murray Center have been watching McElwee’s films, starting with his seminal SHERMAN’S MARCH (1985) and culminating with the North American premiere of REMAKE (2025) at True/False.

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Join us for this master class with the great filmmaker, who popularized and perfected the first person, cinema of self discovery. The conversation will be moderated by Murray Center alum, filmmaker and McElwee expert Daniel Christian, who has prepared a monograph for the event.

OPENING NIGHT: ROSS MCELWEE'S SPACE COAST

7:00 p.m. — 9:00 p.m. \\ Ragtag Cinema

With Ross McElwee​

Q&A moderated by filmmaker and Murray Center alum Daniel Christian

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Legendary documentary director Ross McElwee introduced the world to his first person style with the seminal masterpiece SHERMAN’S MARCH in 1985 and he will be celebrated at True/False as the 2026 True Vision Award Winner with the North American premiere of his new film, the deeply personal and wonderful REMAKE.

 

But years before his breakthrough and the advent of his signature “cinema of self-discovery,” McElwee made the under-seen and brilliant SPACE COAST, co-directed by Michel Negroponte. The film takes a character-driven look at a down-and-out community near Cape Canaveral, Florida, years after NASA had abandoned them and the space program. As a complex and resonant portrait of three residents in the town, the film showed how nuanced and perceptive McElwee’s filmmaking could be.

 

Then with the massive success of SHERMAN’S MARCH and the subsequent honing of his personal cinematic language, SPACE COAST got lost and has been seen little since. With the celebration of McElwee’s full career at this year’s True/False, we thought it was the perfect time to resurrect this beautiful film.

 

The post-screening Q&A will be moderated by Murray Center alum Daniel Christian, who has written extensively about McElwee’s films, including writing and preparing a monograph of his work to accompany this event. Christian is also a filmmaker, whose work (such as his first feature POSSUM TOWN) has been greatly influenced by McElwee.

UNDER THE DREAM: SOMATIC CINEMA AND THE FUTURE STAKES FOR OUR MINDS AT NIGHT

9:00 a.m. — 10:15 a.m. \\ Smith Forum

With Saelyx Finna​

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Technology has explosively infiltrated so many facets of our lives over the past couple decades, changing how we engage with each other, with our communities and our world. But what about our dreams? Dream tech — influencing and directing the little movies our minds produce at night — is the latest frontier of scientific innovation, and the potential consequences are vast, especially for filmmaking.

 

In the 20th century, the mythic properties of dreaming that have fascinated humans since the beginning of time were alchemized into the medium of cinema. There’s a certain dreamlike quality to so many aspects of filmmaking, especially how it compresses time and moves from one moment to the next. Today, the intimate relationship between dreams and cinema approaches a critical inflection point with the emergence of dream tech: technology that directly influences the dreaming mind. 

 

To explore this world, in this session we’ll stage an interactive workshop, inviting attendees to become players as we dramatize the process of engaging dream material as inspiration for creative practice. After this embodied grounding in creative dreamwork, focus will shift to the rapidly developing world of dream tech. For the past several years, filmmaker Saelyx Finna has immersed herself in this world, directing her first feature film Under the Dream — a first-person exploration of technology’s increasing interventions into the dreamscape. Finna brings their findings to Based on a True Story to guide our sleepy brains in an interactive workshop, showing how dreams can serve as source code for cinema, and the stakes of making that code re-writeable. 

HOW TO DISRUPT INEQUITY, HOW TO BUILD A NETWORK: CELEBRATING 10 YEARS OF BROWN GIRLS DOC MAFIA
10:30 a.m. — 11:45 a.m. \\ Smith Forum

With Iyabo Boyd, Kitty Hu, Emily Mkrtichian, and Nell Lawrenz-Wareheim​

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The start of the Brown Girls Doc Mafia in 2015 was impromptu: an impulse from founder Iyabo Boyd to break through the isolation of working in a predominantly white industry as people of color, and to find community. Quickly accumulating a network of Black women under the banner of Black Girls Doc Mafia, and incorporating sister group Desi Girls Doc Mafia, Brown Girls Doc Mafia was formed; underground at first, before announcing itself to the industry at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival. 

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In the decade since its inception, the "Mafia" has grown to more than 5,000 members across the world, and become one of the most influential groups in the documentary film world. BGDM offers a home for women and non-binary people of color to share knowledge, opportunities, and to grow together. But asserting power in an industry that so often tokenizes, diminishes and undervalues professionals of color means creating disruptions. 

 

In this session, Boyd, alongside BGDM members Kitty Hu, Emily Mkrtichian and Nell Lawrenz Wareheim will get into the thick of the strategies that have allowed the Mafia to break down barriers for their network and to leverage their shared resources and intersectionality to forge a path in the industry for their community.

SEIZED: DEFENDING THE FREE PRESS ON FILM

12:45 p.m. — 2:00 p.m. \\ Smith Forum

With Sharon Liese, Sasha Alpert, Paul Matyakovsky, Derek Boonstra, Jackson Montemayor

Moderated by Sebastián Martínez Valdivia

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On Friday August 11, 2023 law enforcement in the small town of Marion, Kansas launched a raid on the local newspaper, The Marion County Record and the home of its editor Eric Meyer.   Officers took laptops, cell phones and documents under the pretext that they were investigating the newspaper's role in an identity theft of a local business owner. The fallout was immediate as was the impact: the next day, Eric’s 98 year-old mother, who lived with him and was home for the duration of the raids, died.

 

The news spread instantly and the implications were obvious: an assault not just on one newspaper, but on a right so fundamental to American democracy it’s enshrined in the constitution. Yet, as is often the case, the truth was messier and thornier — an accumulation of resentments and interpersonal drama that typify small town conflicts. 

 

In SEIZED, director Sharon Liese and her team balance these two elements — the local and the global — to shed light on how vulnerable inalienable rights can become when state and national leaders undermine our norms. In this session, Liese, alongside producers Sasha Alpert and Paul Matyakovsky, editor Derek Boonstra and cinematographer Jackson Montemayor, will take us inside how they kept the human impact at the heart of a front-page story that reverberated around the word.

A MINNESOTA FIELD REPORT: CENTERING COMMUNITY AMID AUTHORITARIAN CHAOS
2:15 p.m. — 3:15 p.m. \\ Smith Forum

With Rachel Lauren Mueller​

Moderated by Sebastián Martínez Valdivia

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No story has so completely encapsulated the fears about creeping authoritarianism in the U.S. as the occupation of the Twin Cities by federal immigration authorities. Federal agents have killed two people in broad daylight, and arrested thousands more, foregoing due process to ship them off to detainment facilities. Videos of the arrests, of violence and the killings have gone viral and played on repeat across social media and legacy news outlets. 

 

As important and harrowing as those images are, they can’t capture the full impact on the communities the administration has targeted. Doing so takes time, building relationships and trust that are core to the documentary process.

 

Investigative journalist and filmmaker Rachel Lauren Mueller knows this process well: it’s an approach she has taken to tell a range of stories, from juvenile detention centers in Louisiana to a racist pagan church in rural Minnesota. When federal agents poured into her neighborhood, the stakes for this kind of story-telling were even higher, and Mueller has accordingly spent time on both the front lines of the protests against ICE and embedding into the community response. Taking a number of precautions to ensure the safety of her participants, Mueller brings the BOATS audience into her works in progress with a one-of-a-kind field report.

CANARIES IN THE SPORTS GAMBLING COAL MINE
3:30 p.m. — 5:00 p.m. \\ Smith Forum

With Nick Berardini and a very special guest

Moderated by Eric Hynes

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With sports betting now legal in Missouri and across much of country, a new generation of fans are coming up with access to instant gambling right in their pockets. This has led to billions of dollars flowing into online sports books, increased eyeballs for leagues like the NBA, tons of controversy and FBI indictments.

 

In this session, journalist and former Mizzou basketball player Nick Berardini, an expert in the thorny issues that surround sports gambling, will speak to a very special guest who has intimate knowledge of the consequences of this wild west era.

 

This session will also serve as a film shoot, with a demonstration in the room about how to film an event and public talk for a future project.

 

This highly anticipated session will be strictly off the record and no will be able to enter unless they agree.

 

Come hear a first person account from one of the faces of the current crisis of sports betting. 

CLOSING SESSION: THE FUTURE OF TRUE/FALSE
9:00 a.m. — 10:30 a.m. \\ Smith Forum

With the new artistic director of the fest and Executive Director of the Ragtag Film Society Andrea Luque Káram

Moderated by 2026 Visiting Artistic Director Yance Ford​

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For more than 20 years, the True/False Film Fest has made its name as the preeminent celebration of documentary, art and music, first as the event that put Columbia, MO on the map, then as the widely-recognized best film festival in the world for state of the art documentary film.

 

Founded by David Wilson and Paul Sturtz, the fest has been programmed throughout the years by such documentary superstars as Chris Boeckmann, Abby Sun and Chloé Trayner. For the 2026 fest, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Yance Ford has taken the reins as Visiting Artistic Director, a one year position.

 

With Executive Director Andrea Luque Káram settling in and a new Artistic Director set to begin soon, True/False is at a crossroads.

 

This session will be a deep dive into the management and programming philosophies of Andrea and the brand new (not yet announced) AD. How will True/False survive the rocky waters of the topsy turvy film industry? What is the new AD’s programming philosophy and how will that shape the next several years of everyone’s favorite film festival? How has Yance’s one year stint as the programming lead changed the festival already?

 

If you care about True/False, Ragtag and the future of film curation - and if you want to meet the new AD - make sure not to miss this session.