True/False 2025

There’s only one prize to be won at True/False, and the winner is announced well beforehand. The twenty-second True Vision Award goes to Hu Sanshou, who will be on hand to discuss two of his films, Mountain Village (2013), a portrait of his grandparents’ village in the northwestern Chinese province of Shaanxi, and Resurrection (2024), which tracks the relocation of ancestral burial grounds to make way for a tunnel. Invited to present a film he considers to be an influence on his own work, Hu Sanshou has selected Blue (1993), the final feature by Derek Jarman, in which he and “some of his long-serving collaborators narrate a text that is scoured by illness, fired by fury, and radiated by lyricism,” as David Jays wrote in the Guardian in 2023.

Seven features in the 2025 program are world premieres, including one recommended by Max Havey, Ian Bell’s WTO/99, an archival film that “reflects on the ideas of accountability and citizen journalism” in that it draws on footage shot by protesters—among the first to be armed with video cameras—gathering in Seattle 1999 to give voice to the then-rising opposition to economic globalization. Eight features arrive in Columbia following their premieres at Sundance, including the winner of a Grand Jury Prize, Seeds, a portrait of Black farmers in the American South by cinematographer and first-time director Brittany Shyne.

One of the most offbeat offerings will be John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office, directed by Michael Almereyda (Experimenter, Tesla) and Courtney Stephens (Invention) and narrated by Chloë Sevigny. In the early days of the Cold War, John C. Lilly was a respected scientist intrigued by the prospect of communication between species and the potential of psychoactive drugs to unlock primal secrets kept from the conscious mind. Respect began to dissipate when Lilly’s experiments with bottleneck dolphins and isolation tanks led him to drift into the company of such counterculture figures as Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, and Werner Erhard. Lilly’s work inspired two films, Mike Nichols’s The Day of the Dolphin (1973) and Ken Russell’s Altered States (1980).

John Lilly “isn’t a biopic so much as a study of a few tumultuous decades in U.S. history, and how ideas—even and especially the most absurd—can seep into culture,” writes Leonardo Goi at the Film Stage. At Filmmaker, where Giovanni Marchini Camia interviews Almereyda and Stephens, Vadim Rizov points out that one of the film’s “clear takeaways is that universal reverence for dolphins and whales, and how their preservation became a stand-in for caring about the environment as a whole, is a direct and uncomplicatedly laudable part of Lilly’s legacy.”

Almereyda and Stephens “have openly admitted to their differing levels of affection for their subject,” notes Jordan Cronk in a dispatch to Film Comment from Rotterdam, “and there’s an appropriately palpable tension to the film’s restless form, which shifts between Stephens’s signature essayistic approach and talking-head interviews that the veteran Almereyda felt would help demystify Lilly. During the Q&A, the directors were open to critiques from the audience about the film’s structure, which they say may change as it continues to travel.” Screening tomorrow, Saturday, and Sunday in Columbia, John Lilly and the Earth Coincidence Control Office will screen once more in New York on Tuesday as part of Doc Fortnight 2025 at the Museum of Modern Art.