True/False 2026

Zaman, whose films have screened at Sundance, the Museum of Modern Art, and the New York Film Festival, has written for Reverse Shot and Film Comment and worked with the Museum of the Moving Image, Brown Girls Doc Mafia, and Field of Vision, the nonfiction platform cofounded by Laura Poitras, AJ Schnack, and Charlotte Cook. Zaman will be working closely with Andrea Luque Káram, the executive director of Ragtag Film Society, the nonprofit that launched True/False in 2004.

The Great Experiment is a kaleidoscopic portrait of a country in flux, shot in stark black and white all across the U.S. from 2017 to 2020. While that timeframe stretches from Trump’s first inauguration through the pandemic and the summer of the protests ignited by the killing of George Floyd, Maing and Metzgar’s focus is on the out-of-the-way places. In a clip up at Deadline, for example, the congregation of a church in rural Pennsylvania gathers for a communal blessing of their AR-15 assault rifles.

The recipient of this year’s True Vision Award is Ross McElwee, renowned for such first-person diary films as Sherman’s March (1985) and Bright Leaves (2003). “Located on a spectrum somewhere between Nick Broomfield’s citizen journalism and Caveh Zahedi’s insufferable narcissism,” writes Michael Sicinski at In Review Online, “McElwee has managed to locate a kernel of narrative entertainment in the day-to-day, partly because he is a compelling character. Shy, honest, and frequently overwhelmed by life’s demands, McElwee comes across as an everyman in the form of a reserved Southern gentleman.”

The subject of Remake, McElwee’s first film in fourteen years, is the death of his son, Adrian, who was twenty-seven when he overdosed on fentanyl. “McElwee’s pain saturates every frame,” writes Sicinski, “and is made even more poignant by his attempts to keep his agony at bay.” Invited to screen a film that has influenced his own work, McElwee has selected Ed Pincus’s Diaries (1976), which Yance Ford calls “a foundational work of personal nonfiction.”

The 2026 True Life Fund selection is How to Clean a House in 10 Easy Steps, the directorial debut of Carolina González Valencia, who worked with her family for more than eight years to tell the story of how they have coped with her mother’s decision decades ago to leave Colombia for the U.S. to provide for her family through domestic work. This year’s Show Me True/False title is Sharon Liese’s Seized, which tracks the tragic fallout of a 2023 police raid on the Marion County Record, a weekly newspaper in Kansas.

Along with twenty-one world premieres, True/False 2026 will offer several critical favorites from this year’s Sundance, including the winner of the Grand Jury Prize, Nuisance Bear, directed by Jack Weisman and Gabriela Osio Vanden. Depicting the deteriorating conditions for polar bears and the Inuit people in the Canadian Arctic, Nuisance Bear is “a doc of lingering beauty, sadness, insight, and even unexpected humor,” finds the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney.