True/False is celebrating a successful 22nd edition of the all-documentary festival in Columbia, MO. The event which wrapped on Sunday drew an attendance of more than 31,000 to film screenings and music showcases, according to organizers.
“The 2025 edition of True/False felt like a much-needed moment of joy and togetherness for our community,” Artistic Director Chloé Trayner tells Deadline. “We brought together so many people to celebrate nonfiction storytelling, welcoming back old friends as well as introducing new faces to the festival and we couldn’t have hoped for a better year.”
Over the course of four days, the festival hosted 30 feature documentaries and 24 shorts, as well as art installations and music performances. Among the world premieres was WTO/99, a documentary directed by Ian Bell about the massive protests that erupted in Seattle in 1999 around the World Trade Organization meeting. “Crafted from a stunning array of newscaster broadcasts and outtakes, citizen journalist tapes, home videos, and press conferences,” True/False notes, “WTO/99 is an entirely archival film chronicling this consequential four-day event.”
Protesters and police in ‘WTO/99’
True/False
In an interview with Deadline that will air as part of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast this coming Tuesday, Bell and producer Alex Megaro discussed that seminal moment marking the emergence of a political movement in opposition to global trade – a phenomenon that, a generation later, has become central to public debate in the Trump era.
“We enter ‘99 having been under the WTO for four years, and I think a lot of people had started to see how it was going to play out with more jobs going overseas,” said Bell, setting the scene for the documentary. “The labor unions saw that this version of free trade was starting to threaten manufacturing and other labor markets in the States and the environmental movement understood that the WTO had the capacity to undermine domestic laws that protected our environment. And so out of all the places the WTO chose to meet, they chose a place [Seattle] that was highly unionized and deeply energetic around the environmental movement.”
True/False also played host to the world premiere of The Track, directed by Ryan Sidhoo, a film about young Bosnian athletes who train on the luge and bobsleigh track that was originally built for the 1984 Olympic Winter Games held in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. During the brutal civil war in Bosnia in the 1990s – a time when 100,000 Bosnians died at the hands of Serbian-aligned forces – the concrete luge track served as a defensive barrier for Sarajevo. It remains pocked with bullet holes today and only kept in serviceable form for athletes through the volunteer efforts of a dedicated coach.
‘The Track‘ director Ryan Sidhoo (left) with film participant Mirza Nikolajev at True/False
Matthew Carey
True/False welcomed Sidhoo and one of his protagonists, luger Mirza Nikolajev, for a Q&A after the world premiere. Miraz got choked up as he described experiencing the film, which was made over a period of years.
“It’s amazing really just watching like the past eight years of your life and… it’s a bit tough for me to talk at the moment,” Nikolajev said. “Very emotional seeing everything that’s happened. That’s how we developed during our growing up.” He added praised for Sidhoo, saying, “He made it feel like he wasn’t even there recording it. I’m very glad that he did that. So now we can cherish the memory. We can have it always — I can show it to my friends and my future kids, potentially.”
The graffiti-covered concrete track of the Sarajevo luge-bobsleigh run on Mount Trebevic in Bosnia-Herzegovina
Christian Charisius/picture alliance via Getty Images
“The Track is, for me, kind of a perfect True/False film because I love films that are really layered in that way,” Trayner told Deadline. “It’s exploring both this nation’s history, but also this very specific story of these three young boys and their coach training in luge. And that kind of micro and macro layers for me is just so exciting to see because you have that real kind of human connection with these incredible characters, but you’re also kind of getting this bigger backdrop. And the themes of that film I think are incredibly universal, even if you don’t know anything about Bosnia going into it.”
At True/False, they readily acknowledge that documentary is a subjective artform, despite a perception — decades ago — that documentary somehow conveyed objective truth.
“I think the idea of documentary as reality is a lie, has been a lie since the very beginning,” Trayner observed. “This is cinema, this is art… You can never just turn on a camera and capture everything. And even if you did, you still can’t express a person’s entire being in a 90-minute film. You can’t express an entire political situation, nor do I think you should have to.”
Trayner added, “I think thinking about documentary much more as a human experience expression and a way to see the world and understand the world, but also very consciously being aware that all films are constructed, is really exciting and important to me for audiences to be more embracing of that concept.”
True/False is a program of the nonprofit Ragtag Film Society – a name that says something fundamental about the festival’s ethos.
The Ragtag cafe and cinema venue in Columbia, MO
Matthew Carey
“Ragtag is very accurate to both the spirit that the organization started in and also how we continue to work today,” Trayner noted. “The festival was started by a group of people who were all very interested in having a community art space here in Columbia, Missouri… At Ragtag Cinema [the nonprofit’s theater that operates year-round] we still have couches. We don’t have traditional cinema seating. As the festival has gotten older, we have professionalized and streamlined and developed as any organization should. But at our heart, our core value is still very much playfulness. And pairing that with one of our other values, which is integrity, I think really summarizes how we bring the ragtag spirit still through now in 2025.”
Trayner continued, “It’s very much about joy and not about very sterile, controlled situations. True/False is something that feels like magic, like it shouldn’t exist. And yet every year everybody comes together and creates this transformative experience together for four days, and then it disappears, and it’s gone. And then you come back the next year and you’re like, Ooh, what’s going to happen? It reinvents itself every year.”