Waiting between the worlds

On the Great Pause and a hope for something reborn.

I think sometimes, with a squeeze around my heart, about the last night.

For me it didn’t occur the last night before the lockdowns started; it was a few days earlier. I was in Columbia, Missouri at the True/False Film Festival, the four days during which I feel most at home in the world. The film world is fairly small, but the documentary community is particularly tight-knit — nobody’s getting rich off documentaries who values the craft more than polemics — and they welcome critics in, too. They seem to have an instinctive sense that we’re all doing the same thing, on the same team, floundering toward the same goal: Understanding the world better by facing it in nonfiction.

That means in the last five years or so, I’ve become good friends with a number of genuine rockstars who most people have never heard of. People who directed documentaries that were nominated for Oscars. People who directed documentaries that should have been nominated for Oscars. People who make movies that play with nonfiction in ways that most of the public don’t think of as “documentaries” at all — movies that scare you and challenge you and make you wonder about the way you perceive everything, and the way stories conceal and reveal the truth. Some of the best filmmakers on the planet, and best people.

The True/False Film Festival is the nexus for this community in the US, and usually it happens in early March, though they’re moving it to May this year so they can do screenings outdoors, not knowing what the pandemic situation will be like by then but pretty sure we won’t be able to crowd into the usual venues. (Who knows who “we” will be, or if I will be among them.)

I love this festival. It’s small. It’s not pretentious, but the films are world-class. Getting a berth at True/False is, to a select number of filmmakers, like getting a premiere at Telluride or Venice or Cannes. It’s a big deal. But they don’t make a big deal of it; there are no red carpets, no industry screenings, no buzzy junkets. Just some press and some filmmakers from out of town and then, for the most part, Mizzou students and mid-Missourians. At least half of any given audience are from the local area, and they all show up game for whatever is about to happen on screen. These films are wild sometimes, formally difficult or emotionally harrowing or thematically challenging. They’re also often funny and moving. I never see a bad film at True/False.

This year I went to True/False with the possibility of a looming virus in the air. There were already cases on the west coast. We didn’t know how bad it would be, if this would be another ebola or swine flu situation, or if it would be more like 100 years ago, when the flu killed a lot of Americans. We just didn’t know. So we went.

From Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets, which is, technically, a documentary.

I went a day early because I was hosting a strange panel at a conference at Mizzou’s journalism school, a conference that happens the day and a half before True/False every year and is designed to leverage visiting talent for the good of the students. My panel was on Bill and Turner Ross’s film Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets. I’d first seen it in December, about a month prior to Sundance, in preparation for a more sedate panel at the Filmmaker’s Lodge at the festival in January. Now I had rewatched it and I was prepared for a panel in which we mimicked the filming process, the brainchild of another friend, the filmmaker Robert Greene, who teaches there.

I can’t really describe the film for you (just read the review). It’s sufficient to say that when I saw it first, I described it as a film in which the last night of a dive bar, one of those friendly neighborhood places where everyone knows each other’s names, stands in for the end of the world.

On the last night of the festival, I sat in a diner in Columbia with three friends, all extremely accomplished in their fields. We ordered coffee and waffles (that’s what they serve after the festival ends) and we talked about the films we had seen and the possibility that this pandemic would cause real problems. The SXSW festival in Austin had announced while we were in Missouri that they were cancelling the edition of the festival slated to run in a couple of weeks. I was feeling sad, and nervous.

I turned down an invitation to go to an afterparty because I was exhausted and feeling a little miserable. (I have regretted that decision for a long while, but who would have known?) I went back to the hotel, packed up, got to bed relatively early, flew home the next day.

I have seen those friends only briefly in the months since, in little Zoom boxes on my screen. I feel pretty confident I’ll see them all again. I feel pretty confident we’ll be at True/False again, some time soon, though probably not this year, and anyhow, there won’t be diners and pancakes this year. Our diner was the dive bar, for all intents and purposes, and the world was coming to an end of some kind, with the new one yet to reveal itself.

We are still waiting for that revelation, I think. This year has been just one big pause button. It is November now; my birthday is this week, and my chief feeling outside of the usual aching sadness is that it has to still be March. I have not seen most of the people I know and love in eight months, and counting. The ones I’ve seen, I haven’t hugged. I used to spend many evenings in cinemas and screenings, sometimes a chat and a drink at the bar after to sort it all out, and then the subway home — the parts that made the job good. Now I just plug away at the laborious part, and trust that the rest will return eventually.

This summer we went to a drive-in theater, just once, thanks to a work assignment, since we don’t own a car. We had to see whatever they were playing that night, and it was Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets. I hesitated, thinking an experimental documentary I’d seen three times might not be quite the right choice for a drive-in.

But it is a movie about sitting, gently, with people you love, in a place you love, and getting ready for it all to change, and hoping that the future might look okay. I saw it in June, and I think of it almost every day. I am waiting here, too, in the space between the end of one world and the beginning of another.