True/False officially begins tonight, but as is tradition, the festival hosted a special preview screening last night for students at the University of Missouri. The film was ???an Alternative to Slitting Your Wrist, and it was a perfect pick for the young crowd. 25 year-old Owen Lowery, who directed, edited and appears in nearly every frame of the autobiographical doc, doesn’t exactly break new thematic ground or wow with his filmmaking prowess, but that???s part of the point: super-accessible and unencumbered by the constraints of traditional cinematic language, Wrist is pure peer-to-peer catharsis.
The film follows Lowery from 24th birthday to 25th, as he attempts to conquer a list of 52 things that he???s always wanted to do, one for each week of the year. We learn early on that Lowery made the list whilst in a psych ward, where he was recovering from a suicide attempt. At first, Lowery milks some of the less-noble list items for comic relief: he gets shot with a taser, he gets but by a scorpion and, thankfully, we’re spared the footage of him “taking a dump on Mount Rushmore.” But the list eventually settles into a structuring gimmick that gives Lowery license to confront his real demons. It becomes apparent that the project isn???t really about the list at all, but about the personal traumas??????childhood sexual abuse, his father???s drinking problem as well as his own??????that led Lowery to his personal rock bottom.
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