Stronger Than Fiction 2020

These sixteen films are the work of graduate and undergraduate students in the Documentary Journalism Program at the Jonathan B. Murray Center for Documentary Journalism at the Missouri School of Journalism. They are the culmination of two years of work fulfilling the requirements for their degrees.

From the pitch to production, these students put everything into their work and these films are the fruits of that labor.

This festival is normally held in person at the historic Missouri Theatre on the University of Missouri campus. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we have moved the festival online so we can still celebrate the accomplishments of these talented filmmakers.

This is the fourth annual Stronger Than Fiction Film Festival and is our most international yet. These documentaries were filmed in Canada, China, Morocco, Spain, Sweden and in twelve different states in the United States, from the California desert to the Mississippi bayou.

Special thanks this year goes to Charlotte Cook and the team of filmmakers at Field of Vision for providing priceless guidance to our student filmmakers as they finished their projects.

We define “documentary journalism” in all kinds of ways and these films represent a wide array of styles and interests from a diverse group of students. The end of this year has been tough on everyone but we’re proud of the effort and resilience of our filmmakers. We share these films as an act of solidarity and we hope you enjoy!

-Robert Greene, Filmmaker-in-Chief
-Stacey Woelfel, Director


Festival Jury

Bennett Elliott is an Emmy award-winning producer based in New York. She has produced films including Abel Ferrara's SPORTIN' LIFE (Venice 2020), Kim Snyder’s US KIDS (Sundance 2020), Abel Ferrara’s THE PROJECTIONIST (Tribeca Film Festival 2019) and Robert Greene’s Gotham Award nominated BISBEE ’17 (Sundance 2018). Bennett was the co-producer of Greene’s multiple award-winning Sundance documentary KATE PLAYS CHRISTINE (2016). She was selected as a 2017-2018 Sundance Institute Creative Producing Fellow, a Doc NYC 40-Under-40 Fellow, and has produced documentary films for David Byrne, Rob Epstein, Jeffrey Friedman and Nan Goldin. Elliottt has coordinated television series for Bravo, the Food Network and Sundance Channel. In 2015 she was named Head of Production at Mustache Agency, a Brooklyn-based creative agency and produced hundreds of video campaigns for clients including American Express, Chevy, Ford, Conde Nast and the Netherlands Board of Tourism. Her award winning documentary, fiction film and music video work as producer and co-founder at the production collective House of Nod has taken her all over the world.

Eric Hynes is a New York-based film critic and reporter, as well as Curator of Film at Museum of the Moving Image. He has written for the New York Times, Film Comment, Rolling Stone, IndieWire, Slate, the Village Voice, and Time Out New York. Since 2004 he has been a staff writer for the online film journal Reverse Shot, where he’s also the host and co-producer of the Reverse Shot Talkies video series.

Lana Wilson is an Emmy Award-winning and two-time Spirit Award-nominated director, writer, and producer based in New York. Her most recent film, The Departure, premiered at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival and was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary. Wilson’s first film, After Tiller, premiered at Sundance in 2013 and went on to win an Emmy for Best Documentary. It was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award, four Cinema Eye Honors, and the Ridenhour Prize. After Tiller was theatrically released in 50 US cities by Oscilloscope and nationally broadcast on POV. Flavorwire named it one of the “50 Best Documentaries of All Time.” Wilson has also worked in television, including writing the premiere episode of the miniseries I Am Rebel for National Geographic Studios. She is currently a MacDowell Fellow, a Women at Sundance Fellow, and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt.


Q&As with the filmmakers

Since this was a different year with the festival happening entirely online, the Q&As with the filmmakers were also online. You can find the films on this list and follow the links, or play any of the videos at the bottom of the page.

  • Saturday, May 16 at 7 pm CDT - Q&A with the directors of 46 Years, The Forward Momentum of Madellyn Knightley, Green Cheese Moon and Natchez.
    Click here to see the recorded Q&A or scroll to the bottom of this page.

  • Saturday, May 16 at 8 pm CDT - Q&A with the directors of Compagnon de ma calamité, Diary of a Teenage Zealot, First Holiday and Thoughts and Prayers.
    Click here to see the recorded Q&A or scroll to the bottom of this page.

  • Sunday, May 17 at 7 pm CDT - Q&A with the directors of My Fellow Countrymen, My Name is Clotilda, Parallel and Tecopa Lost.
    Click here to see the recorded Q&A or scroll to the bottom of this page.

  • Sunday, May 17 at 8 pm CDT - LQ&A with the directors of Being Erika, The Hat, Las Vegas and Second Semester Senior Year.
    Click here to see the recorded Q&A or scroll to the bottom of this page.


Films

46 Years

dir. Catherine Hoffman

46 Years chronicles the Nation of Islam, an unsolved murder in 1967, a man who had to grow up without a father and a man who had to live with the guilt of his brother’s death for almost five decades. The filmmaker grew up with broken and contradictory accounts of her grandfather’s murder, the stories scattered across states and generations. In 46 Years, she attempts to glue the pieces together and unearth the truth of an event that rocked a family and the Black Muslim community across America.


Being Erika

dir. Seiler Burr

More than six years ago, a lifelong love of insects brought Erika Thompson to a class where she realized her passion for beekeeping. Being Erika is an observational documentary filmed in central Texas that explores Thompson’s transition from passion to business, as well as her role in preserving bee populations. This short film takes the audience into the heart of Texas and is a love letter to those who turn their passions into reality.


Compagnon de ma calamité

dir. Nick Corder

“Last semester, I went to Canada, leaving the Midwest in search of the cosmic je-ne-sais-quoi.” Compagnon de ma calamité (Companion in My Calamity) is an immersive travel film in which the director explores aspects of living abroad vis-à-vis his experience living in Quebec. As summer turns into a Canadian winter, postcard images of his neighborhood pop up like memories. What do we remember when we leave a place? How do we process it? What narratives can we construct from our past? Why?


Diary of a Teenage Zealot

dir. Megan Liz Smith

A diaristic self-portrait of a filmmaker’s ongoing crisis of faith, this film combines materials gathered both during and after her life in the Assemblies of God church, the world’s largest Pentecostal denomination. Featuring transparent confessions to the camera and eye-opening images from the past, the film examines the chasm religious identity can leave in the middle of families. As the director loses her faith, she struggles to reconcile the reality of her beliefs with the love she has for her family and friends, whose beliefs equate atheism with eternal damnation. 

Winner of the Stronger Than Fiction 2020 Jury Prize for Best Editing      


First Holiday

dir. Myles Murdock

On the day the filmmaker’s grandfather died, his grandmother was the only person to whom he wanted to speak. When he called her that evening to see how she was doing, she immediately turned the question on him. “Holding a lot back,” he said “I’m doing okay. It’s just been a hard day,” to which his grandmother replied “A hard day because of school or a hard day because Bob died?” The film explores the loss of love and its impact on how descendants of that first couple experience it.


The Forward Momentum of Madellyn Knightley

dir. Jackson Kinkead

The Forward Momentum of Madellyn Knightley is an experimental docufiction about high school addiction and invasive poppy flowers. Madellyn is an introverted heroine who reflects on her drug trauma. Her testimony gives insight into an off-screen drug culture and charts her path extracting herself from youthful despair. 

 The non-chronological narrative and expressive visual symbolism create a volatile and hallucinatory structure. The film confronts itself using on-screen text and inhuman juxtapositions. As Madellyn softly reconsiders her past, the film simultaneously exorcizes its own narrative reliability. Madellyn’s individualism is one such questioned element. Despite the experimental tendencies, the film subtly adheres to direct observations about Madellyn’s story.  

 The initial work for this film began in 2015. In 2019, prior to production commencing, the director learned from the city of Louisville’s largest syringe exchange office and internalized the concept of harm reduction. During production, interview sessions were spontaneous to allow Madellyn to use her surroundings to speak for what was internally unutterable.


Green Cheese Moon

dir. Colleen Andrae

The film focuses on Robert Richardson, who spent nearly nine years in prison due to Missouri's HIV criminalization laws. Since being put in place in 1988, these laws have seen few revisions and none of them addresses modern scientific understanding of prevention, transmission and treatment of HIV. Green Cheese Moon chronicles Richardson’s fight to change the outdated laws and end the stigma they perpetuate.


The Hat

dir. Thomas Rechenberg

The Hat explores viewers’ visceral emotions evoked by the most politically divisive symbol of our time: President Donald Trump’s MAGA hat. Director Thomas Rechenberg travels to three US cities capturing thoughts on how an inanimate object can be so polarizing. The film challenges audiences to decide whether the true meaning of the hat lies with the individual wearing it—or the person seeing it.


Las Vegas

dir. Amanda Amodeo

Las Vegas immerses the audience in a modern city symphony situated in downtown Las Vegas. This experimental documentary presents the narrative conflicts of man versus nature, man versus society and man versus himself. This biased portrait of the heart of the city encapsulates its spirit through a naive lens. This film provides an experience of manufactured, man-made beauty of a city built in the Mojave Desert.


My Fellow Countrymen

dir. Aleksandar Petraskovic

My Fellow Countrymen centers on two families who have emigrated from Serbia, one living in Sweden and the other in Canada. In these new lands, the families are reexamining their national identities through the prism of their children who have now spent most of their lives far away from their home countries. Balancing their children’s well-being and nostalgia for home, the families have yet to decide whether to return to Serbia home. The question now is just where is home?


My Name is Clotilda

dir. Clotilda DeMauro

After rediscovering an old camcorder at the age of 22, a young woman pieces together her journey in mental health, relationships, and self-image using footage of her younger and older selves. Performance, poetry, and music are used to tell the story of the ones who never felt they had a place in this world and were left with only one option—to make worlds of their own. 


Natchez

dir. Daniel Christian

In a small Mississippi town known for its opulent antebellum homes, a handful of locals who work in or adjacent to the tourism industry go about their daily lives. With tourism the town’s primary economy, myths of the Old South are not merely felt beneath the surface but make up the surface itself, and everyday interactions are inevitably imbued with the region’s fraught past. Stuck in the amber of a Confederate fantasy, locals eternally contend with questions of history and mythology, of industry and power. The characters of Natchez find joy, peace and melancholy amidst these specters in this vibrant portrait of life in the American South.

Winner of the Stronger Than Fiction 2020 Jury Prize for Best Film


Parallel

dir. Yuejiao Jiang

The lives of the two young Chinese men cross at a fast food restaurant during the summer in the ancient town of Yueyang.  Nineteen-year-old student Huang takes a delivery job to support himself while skating with his friends. Eighteen-year-old Liu dropped out of high school and now owns several small catering businesses. The film observes the peers’ intersecting lives, challenging the audience to choose a favorite.


Second Semester Senior Year

dir. Manuela Kalamboukas

Following a state order to close all schools for the remainder of the academic year, a high school senior and her friends try to carry on when all sense of normalcy in their last months in high school have been stolen from them.


Tecopa Lost

dir. Danny Mac Stayton

Tecopa is a small town in the middle of the Mojave Desert just outside of Death Valley. Most people drive right through, drawn like moths to the bright lights of Las Vegas and Los Angeles. But there is something special in this hot, dry place--something worth stopping for. Hot springs pool under the cloudless sky. This hidden gem of the desert is an oasis. But just who are the people who decide to stay and call this oddball paradise home? 

Winner of the Stronger Than Fiction 2020 Jury Prize for Best Nonfiction Collaboration


Thoughts and Prayers

dir. Sarah Sabatke

As a community prepares to mark the 20th anniversary of the shooting at Columbine High School, two award-winning journalists reflect on their coverage of the event and its long-term effects. Meanwhile, community members remember their lost loved ones amid unrelenting media attention - until, three days before the anniversary, a new threat puts the community on high alert. Thoughts and Prayers explores how people remember the day of the shooting and how they navigated media coverage of the event, from both sides of the camera. Set against the lead-up to the event’s 20th anniversary, the film follows journalists and survivors as they reflect on the past two decades and strive to spread a message of hope. Intimate access allows viewers into the lives of individuals impacted by the tragedy as they deal with the new wave of media attention brought to town by the anniversary.

Winner of the Stronger Than Fiction 2020 Jury Prize for Best Director

 

Saturday, May 16 at 7 pm CDT - Q&A with the directors of 46 Years, The Forward Momentum of Madellyn Knightley, Green Cheese Moon and Natchez.

 

Saturday, May 16 at 8 pm CDT - Q&A with the directors of Compagnon de ma calamité, Diary of a Teenage Zealot, First Holiday and Thoughts and Prayers.