FILM SERIES
True to Life
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.

James Wilkins and Andrew Wilson share an evening of sly and incisive shorts and performances.

Fox Maxy (Ipai Kumeyaay and Payómkawichum) reflects on memory, identity, and environments.

Influential works from Jim McBride and George Kuchar depicting the inner lives of artists.

Sophia Al Maria and Larry Achiampong explore cultural narratives in sci-fi-influenced works.

Garnett connects the construction of personal identity with Ireland’s political struggles.

Surprisingly revelatory corporate-sponsored documentaries by Albert Maysles and William Greaves.

A quiet, profound meditation on the “modern fugitivism” of the undocumented experience.

Three teen girls grapple with friendship and desire amid a summer of synchronized swimming.

These works by women touch on money, motherhood, memory, and the process of making.

Bordowitz’s 1993 film about living with HIV and the 1960 cinema verité film that inspired it.