How to Clean a House in Ten Easy Steps by Carolina González Valencia
The True/False Film Festival, the nonfiction cinematic showcase in Columbia, Missouri, has announced the lineup for its 2026 edition, running March 5–8, featuring 62 new feature and short films with selections from Latin America and Latino USA.
Known for spotlighting innovative nonfiction that pushes the boundaries between documentary, hybrid, and experimental forms, the festival will host the world premiere of Carolina González Valencia’s How to Clean a House in Ten Easy Steps, starring Beatriz Valencia, a Colombian-born domestic worker in the U.S., and her daughter Carolina—the filmmaker herself—as they collaborate to invent a fictional writer character. Moving between truth and fantasy, this hybrid documentary explores their intertwined experiences of immigration, labor, and womanhood.
Also featured is the North American premiere of Care / Cuidadoras by Argentine directors Martina Matzkin and Gabriela Uassouf, which follows three transgender women caring for elderly residents in a senior home, where deep bonds of empathy and connection emerge.
In her debut feature A Place of Absence, director Marialuisa Ernst travels with the Caravan of Mothers of Missing Migrants on their annual 2,500-mile bus trek through Mexico, unpacking her uncle’s disappearance from Argentina’s dictatorship era.
Two filmmakers of Venezuelan origin, will also screen their films True/False: Nuisance Bear by Venezuelan-Canadian filmmaker Gabriela Osio Vanden, co-directed by Jack Weisman and TCB – The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing by Venezuelan-British director Monica Henriquez, co direcredbt Louis Massiah.
Recent winner of the U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Documentary at Sundance, Nuisance Bear follows a polar bear in Manitoba, Canada, forced to navigate a human world of tourists, wildlife officers, and hunters as its ancient migration collides with modern life. TCB – The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing is an archival-rich biography of writer-activist Toni Cade Bambara, whose novels, essays, and filmmaking galvanized movements, illuminated by testimonies from Toni Morrison, Nikky Finney, and Haile Gerima.
In Tropical Park by Cuban-American director Hansel Porras Garcia, a pair of siblings talk about racism, transphobia, past lives and, somehow, also fit in a driving lesson In one single take. True North, the latest feature by Haitian-Panamanian director Michèle Stephenson (Going To Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project) is a deep archival dig tells us about 1969’s Black student protests at Montreal’s Concordia University. In teaching us history, it teaches us about our presents.
Following its premieres at Sundance and Berlin, Jaripeo by Efraín Mojica and Rebecca Zweig offers a complex portrait of masculinity in the Michoacán rodeos, tracing an intimate journey into identity within a tradition often coded as hyper-masculine.
Also from Mexico is the world premiere of the short film Wait for Me / Páa’tenehu, directed by Thiago Zanato, set against a storm battering Southeast Mexico, where a family listens to their grandmother’s stories as they seek shelter in their butcher shop.
Other Latin American and U.S. Latinx shorts include Ancestral Knowledge by Ruby Chasi, which follows Napuruna midwives in the Ecuadorian Amazon as they assist in birth; Sudakas, in which director Ricardo Betancourt shares the realities of working a low-wage job in the U.S. through his Venezuelan immigrant mother’s lived experience; and the world premiere of Endlings by Costa Rican filmmaker María Luisa Santos, where the filmmaker wanders churches, DNA labs, and ghostly archives, asking what endures when what we love is vanishing.
