With Love True, Israeli director Alma Har’el dove into the myriad ways that wholly loving another person can play out—romantic, platonic, familial—and emerged with what looks to be a dreamstate of a documentary, full of woozy shots set to an original score by Flying Lotus. For some of the scenes, Har’el asked her subjects to narrate their feelings and then had other subjects act out their stories, occasionally pairing them with their actor “younger selves” in matching white tees and tap-dance costumes.
The trailer is explicitly beautiful and there’s also something terrifying about it, I guess not unlike love, the feeling of emotional freefall with no knowledge of where, or if, you might land. Shia LeBeouf produced so you’ll hear about it even after it premieres this weekend at the Tribeca Film Festival (where the unfinished version also screened last year), but it looks like it will be able to stand on its merits after that. Last year, Indiewire wrote about the first screenings:
Har’el said she’s comfortable blending what is real and what isn’t, and believes there is plenty of room in documentary for staging and performance. “Fuck the fly on the wall. Let’s be the elephant in the room,” she said. “LoveTrue” is equal parts therapy, performance and psychodrama. In love and in relationships, we perform; “you are playing who you think they want you to be,” explained Har’el, “and sometimes when the performance is over, the relationship is over.”
LoveTrue screens Friday at the Tribeca Film Festival.
