Streaming
  • April 2, 2021 through April 15, 2021
New Documentary

“One of the best documentaries that came out in 2020.”

Peter Keough, Boston Globe

An ingenious sci-fi premise yields a profoundly human portrait of life on the margins in Hannah Jayanti’s innovative and unexpectedly moving almost-documentary. The desert town of Truth or Consequences, in New Mexico, U.S.A., sits in the shadow of the world’s first purpose-built commercial spaceport, Spaceport America. Writer-director Jayanti’s self-described ​“speculative documentary” projects a future reality where Spaceport is already shuttling Earth’s wealthiest off to distant, colonized planets. That sparingly referenced backdrop—articulated in voice-over and uncanny 3D photogrammetry—frames an otherwise forthright, observational documentary about the hardscrabble lives of five real-life residents of the titular town (which, in 1950, renamed itself after the popular game show). Their stories, by turns odd and affecting, offer a sobering counterpoint to the tales of opulent space tourism being touted at the local Spaceport Visitor Center. But within the film’s ​“speculative” framework, the townsfolk are also subtly recast as the population that got left behind—the rung too poor to depart our dying planet. A slippery, soulful work, featuring an evocative guitar score by jazz luminary Bill Frisell.

Explore the film’s interactive virtual worlds here.

Watch a Q&A with writer-director Hannah Jayanti and VFX creative director Alexander Porter here.

“Haunted and haunting … [A] disquieting movie.”

Glenn Kenny, New York Times

“Truth or Consequences is the product of a great documentarian letting her heart guide her through a maze of tantalizing intellectual congruences; lesser talents would lose themselves in the thickets.”

Max Carpenter, MUBI Notebook
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