Of Predators and Progress at True/False 2025

The salve of watching documentaries during turbulent political times.

At the end of Sally, a mostly solid if anodyne National Geographic documentary about astronaut Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, I exchanged a wordless “eep” glance with my longtime friend and colleague, Noel Murray. Though the documentary pays appropriate respect to Ride as a trailblazer in the space program, much of its focus rests on her romantic partnership with former tennis pro and science educator Tam O’Shaughnessy, which wasn’t revealed until Ride died of pancreatic cancer in 2012. The two had been together for 27 years, but Ride had chosen to keep this aspect of her life secret, even long after her service at NASA and a more tolerant shift in public opinion. Given what she endured to make it through NASA’s pilot program and onto the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1983—she was, at the time, the most famous (and scrutinized) woman in the country—the doc suggests that it was Ride’s instinct to play it literally straight, denying essential parts of herself in order to achieve a larger goal. She was never able to be who she really was, —at least not in the public eye. 

And so, when Sally ends with uplifting titles about progress—again, completely in the anodyne spirit of the inspirational portraiture—these bullet points ran against the breathtaking regression of our current political reality. One notes the Pride events at NASA—astronauts flew the Pride flag aboard the International Space Station in 2021, according to this piece from the official site—and another talks about Ride’s foundation helping young girls in STEM. (“Well, that’ll be taken away,” whispered Noel.) There have been reports already that NASA has ordered employees to toss rainbow flags or any other shows of support for LGBTQ+ rights in the office setting or risk administrative discipline. And it’s abundantly clear that the Trump administration, under the guise of “merit-driven” employment practices, intends to curb the sorts of initiatives that diversified the agency when Ride was brought into NASA, along with other women and minorities who’d never been in the program. 

Politics were naturally in the air at the 2025 True/False Film Fest, which unfolded last weekend, and the emerging realities of life under the second Trump administration hung heavy over films like Sally, which would have seemed totally innocuous even a few months ago. (Being a Nat Geo production, it will eventually land on Disney+. That’s how non-controversial it should be.) Yet it’s a salve to attend a documentary festival in times like these, especially one like True/False, which is set in the quite-red state of Missouri (albeit in the college-town oasis of Columbia) and attracts an older and perhaps less progressive crowd than its big-city equivalent. Yet the prevailing ethos of the festival is to keep an open mind and heart, and actively engage in processing the films: When you are offered a window into the lives of others, you have to be willing to peer through it with a curious and compassionate eye. Sometimes we need to remind ourselves that we’re always capable of doing that, even when cruelty is the tenor of the times. 

‘WTO/99’

One of the best films I saw at True/False, Ian Bell’s WTO/99, suggests some of the roots of our current problems. Told entirely through a gripping assemblage of archival footage—home video, local and national news broadcasts, press conferences and pundit roundtables, etc.—the film covers the protests in Seattle in late 1999, where the newly empowered World Trade Organization were gathering for a series of trade negotiations. With tens of thousands of people filling the streets, the protests were a comprehensive rebuke to the state of global capitalism, as the WTO and agreements like NAFTA were leading to decimated factory jobs, weakened environmental protections, and human rights violations. But more troubling still, it was a moment in democracy where ordinary citizens were feeling like they had no voice in their own destiny. When important decisions on labor and the economy are abdicated to a shadowy group of delegates holding closed-door meetings around the city, what hope do regular people have to intervene? 

Now 25 years later, WTO/99 is a fascinating record of a protest movement  and the specific on-the-ground tactics of demonstrators and the Seattle police alike, but it seems ever-more-relevant to the tensions in 2025, when the left and the far-right both feel burned by globalization, but come at the issue from vastly different angles. The one common thread is disenfranchisement, and Bell’s documentary captures the symbolic implications of anonymous men in suits looking down from the city’s ivory towers as the little people scatter in a chaotic mist of tear gas and water spray below. The right even to allow such expressions of free speech continues to be under fire to this day—like literally this day—and even then, there’s no sense that anyone in power will be shamed into reversing course. (It says something that Alan Keyes, a marginal Black candidate for the Republican Party in the 2000 Presidential election, articulates the problem as well as anyone.) 

Student activists in ‘Deaf President Now!’

By contrast, the protests documented in Nyle DiMarco and David Guggenheim’s crowd-pleasing Deaf President Now! had a more narrow goal and ultimately the smart tactics to achieve it. Over its 124-year history as an institution for the deaf, Gallaudet University in Washington D.C. had never had a deaf president until 1988, when students were unified in insisting that they finally get a leader who understood their experiences. Given the choice between three candidates, two of whom were deaf, the board of trustees, led by the comically imperious Jane Bassett Spilman, chose a new president who did not even know sign language—a clear indicator that the board was prioritizing the hearing world over the deaf world its students inhabited. Produced for Apple TV+, Deaf President Now! plays almost like a companion piece to Crip Camp, the Obama-produced Netflix documentary about the summer camp that helped trigger a movement for disability rights. Both films are a little too slick, but they’re also inspiring examples of how change can be leveraged through strategic disruption. 

The True/False experience frequently oscillates between activism and adventurous filmmaking, but Middletown fuses the two meaningfully, underlining how the camera can unlock students’ consciences as much as it can develop their creative impulse. Directed by Jesse Moss and Amanda McBaine, the team behind Boys State and Girls State (among other excellent docs), the film revisits a stretch in the ‘90s when high-schoolers in Middletown, New York, a bucolic upstate suburb, turned their “Electronic English” class into an environmental crusade. After building a kind of mini-studio from grant money, teacher Fred Isseks, a tireless eccentric with an antiauthoritarian streak, encouraged his students to investigate a nearby toxic landfill that was carved out over the local aquifer. The sins they uncover draw all kinds of unsavory connections between the government and New York mobsters, but Middletown is most affecting as a story about the difference a great teacher can make in a child’s life. In our age of citizen journalism, everyone with a phone can be an armed truth-seeker under the right guidance. 

Chris Hansen in ‘Predators.’

At its best, True/False continues to share Isseks’ mission, because it’s about encouraging audiences to think their way through documentaries and interrogate the “truths” they’re trying to express rather than taking the images at face value. To that end, David Osit’s Predators and Charlie Shackleton’s Zodiac Killer Project were the two True/False-iest movies I saw at the festival and two of the strongest. Predators is a brilliant, prismatic look at the legacy of To Catch a Predator, the popular NBC Dateline show from the early 2000s that worked like Candid Cameras for sex creeps. The formula was always the same: Producers would use internet chat rooms to bait older men into arranging a sexual rendezvous with a child and bring them into a house filled with hidden cameras, where the show’s blow-dried host, Chris Hansen, would turn up to replace an underaged decoy. Osit is troubled by the whole unsavory spectacle of this primetime entertainment—to say nothing of the popular YouTube spinoffs that continue to this day—and he goes into deeply personal territory in questioning what purpose a show like To Catch a Predator really serves and the truly important insights we fail to see. 

There’s plenty of conceptual and structural surprises in Predators, which ends with a twist too delicious to spoil, but Zodiac Killer Project is an even more full-scale deconstruction. Narrated by Shackleton, a wry young Englishman who takes the audience through his thwarted plans to adapt a nonfiction book called The Zodiac Killer Cover-Up, written by an ex-cop who claims to have spotted the famed serial killer and witnessed a conspiracy to keep his findings from seeing the light. We’re told in the early-going that Shackleton failed to get the rights to the book—which leads to many amusing moments when he uses second-hand accounts to reference the book without getting into legal trouble—but it’s absurd to imagine he had any intent to do anything serious with it. Instead, he uses the opportunity to critique the clichés, manipulations, and boilerplate visual language of true-crime docs, all while skewering their ethical shortcomings and rubbernecking appeals. If you’ve ever rolled your eyes at an Andrew Jarecki project, this one’s for you. 

Other notes from the festival: 

• The Dating Game joins Sally and Deaf President Now! in tidying up a messy story, especially when it’s reaching for larger sociological points about the aftermath of China’s One Child policy, which has left the country with an excess of men in the dating pool. But the scenes where a big-city dating coach teaches “techniques” to shy young men from the country are tremendously entertaining, as are the official and unofficial matchmaking events that the government and desperate parents set up for their lonely kids. 

• How Deep is Your Love puts its British director, Eleanor Mortimer, aboard a 55-day expedition where scientists who specialize in taxonomy—the naming of new species, basically—head to one of deepest seabeds in the Atlantic Ocean and use a special rover to explore the ecosystem. Their colorful and exotic finds tick the right boxes for a nature documentary, and Mortimer’s narration has a Herzogian whimsy that’s hugely appealing. 

• There’s no point in naming a few of the lesser films I saw at True/False, but the festival does like to program documentaries that are more about poetry than prose, evoking a place or a feeling rather than, say, constructing an argument on film. This can work out beautifully—I saw Hale County This Morning, This Evening, by future Nickel Boys director RaMell Ross, at the festival—but my patience for shapeless, vibes-based docs has gotten thinner over the years. When you’re a director, you still have a direct.