True/False is here again! For the 17th year in a row, Columbia’s premier nonfiction film festival will bring in thousands of people for a long weekend of film premieres, concerts, parties and a parade that marches down 9th Street. Whether you’ve got little ones and can’t make it out to all the great films this year or you just want to supplement the festivities with your own little documentary fest at home, the library has a plethora of family-friendly nonfiction films, many of which have screened at True/False and/or at Ragtag Cinema downtown. Here’s a short list of some of the most notable and popular ones:
“Spellbound,” from 2002, follows eight kids competing in the 1999 Scripps National Spelling Bee in Washington D.C. We watch the contestants, all from very different backgrounds, prepare and move from their local bees to the national finals. And then the tension mounts as they all try to hang in until the final round. “Spellbound” was one of the first documentaries to become a genuine box office success, which helped usher in a wave of popularity for nonfiction films.
Co-produced by the National Geographic Society, “March of the Penguins” vividly depicts the yearly journey of the emperor penguins of Antarctica from the ocean to their ancestral breeding grounds. If penguin parents successfully hatch a chick, they must make multiple trips between the ocean and the breeding grounds over the ensuing months to ensure the chick’s survival. “March of the Penguins” is the second-highest grossing documentary film of all time, and won the 2006 Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.
Like “Spellbound,” “First Position” tracks the lives of a diverse group of young people preparing for a competition, but this time it’s ballet instead of spelling. Six dancers compete in the Youth America Grand Prix to earn spots and scholarships in some of the best ballet schools and companies in the world, and we see the lengths that these young people will go to in the service of their art.
France’s Chauvet Cave contains the world’s oldest surviving paintings, some of them around 32,000 years old, and legendary filmmaker Werner Herzog takes you inside to see them up close in “Cave of Forgotten Dreams,” from 2011. Herzog and his crew used 3D cameras to capture the bulges and contours of the cave walls, which are incorporated into the paintings.
Documentary filmmaker John Chester and his partner, Molly, move out of their small Los Angeles apartment and onto a 200 acre farm in Chester’s film, “Biggest Little Farm.” John and Molly want to build a bio-diverse and sustainable farm, but the land they’ve bought is drought-ridden and depleted of nutrients. The film, which documents their eight years of hard work, planting thousands of new trees and hundreds of different crops to try and realize their dream, shows the beauty, power and unpredictability of nature.
“Maiden” is the story of the first-ever all-female crew to compete in the Whitbread Round the World yacht race in 1989. Led by 26-year-old skipper, Tracy Edwards, the crew of the Maiden defied the odds and, with an old boat and without the massive financial support of other teams, finished the grueling 32,000 mile race and made history. This rousing doc uses original footage from the ship’s videographer to help tell the thrilling story of how Edwards’ risky gamble on her unseasoned crew paid off.
