FILM SERIES

Continuing our collaboration with the literary magazine Triple Canopy, this series asks how people compose and comprehend themselves through cinema, and features programs by several notable filmmakers, artists, and critics. True to Life is part of the latest issue of Triple Canopy, which takes up the concept of life writing: the recording of memories and experiences, often one’s own. Typically, life writing points to biography, memoir, diaries, and personal essays—and to a sense of oneself in the world as formed through these conventions. But these genres rarely account for recent shifts in how life is made, understood, represented, and reconfigured, whether through genetic modification, artificial intelligence, or climate change. These dramatic shifts call into question the category of humanity and the prospects for all life. They also make apparent the need to move past default speakers and forms of the past, as those styles and subjectivities feel increasingly inadequate in light of what life has—and will—become.