TRUE/FALSE PRESENTS

Approaching the Elephant

Year
2014
Country
USA
Duration
89’
Director
Amanda Rose Wilder

Year one at the Teddy McArdle Free School in Little Falls, New Jersey, where all classes are voluntary and rules are determined by democratic vote. Amanda is there from the beginning to the end of the school year, documenting and observing founder Alexander Khost, eleven-year-old Jiovanni, seven-year-old Lucy, along with an entire unforgettable cast of young personalities as they form relationships, explore their surroundings and debate rule violations, until it all comes to a head. The film is a vivid portrait of unfettered childhood and human relationships.

Production and Sales
Kingdom County Productions, 949 Somers Road, Barnet, VT 05821, USA, +18023574616, [email protected], www.kingdomcounty.org
Awards
2015 – Best International Film at the DocAviv Film Festival; 2015 – Maysles Brothers Award at the Belfast Film Festival; 2014 – Emerging Cinematic Vision Award at the Camden International Film Festival;
Director
Amanda Rose Wilder

Amanda Rose Wilder spent years writing poems, then in the hills of Vermont began making films, which led to her B.A. thesis ‘The Poetic Documentary and the Documentary Poem’, for which she created poetic documentaries and studied the works of American poets Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Gary Snyder and Jorie Graham as they relate to the documentary impulse found in poetry. Approaching the Elephant is her first feature. She lives in New York where she is working on a film about art models.

Selected Filmography

Approaching the Elephant (2014)

Big Hall
Kinopanorama
vul. Shota Rustaveli, 19
Q&A with director
22 INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL
 6 — 13 
June 2025
(T)ERROR
TRUE/FALSE PRESENTS
(T)ERROR
Year
2015
Country
USA
Directors
Lyric R. Cabral, David Felix Sutcliffe
Duration
84’
TRUE/FALSE PRESENTS
Of Men and War
TRUE/FALSE PRESENTS
Of Men and War
Year
2014
Country
France, Switzerland, USA
Director
Laurent Bécue-Renard
Duration
142’
TRUE/FALSE PRESENTS