True/False Film Fest Wraps Banner 2025 Edition: “We Couldn’t Have Hoped For A Better Year”

deadline.com:

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.” 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