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.

Part self-help exercise in the form of performance art, part semi-serious academic study of post-collegiate depression, part fully-serious, full-on personal purge, Wrist is tonally schizophrenic in a way that, in a previous generation, only a first feature could be. But based on how the crowd reacted last night, I have to wonder if such whiplashing-inducing address is becoming a dominant popular culture style. Certainly, the mostly under-twentysomething crowd last night knew how to read this; they knew how to follow a narrative as it bounced back and forth between performance and confession, between serious and silly. They knew how to laugh at the film’s Jackass-esque moments, and even seemed appreciative that the driving force behind them was not Johnny Knoxville’s nihilism, but a life-affirming emo swoon.

In terms of filmmaking craft, Wrist is basically indistinguishable from any of the more ambitious DIY projects on YouTube, but Lowery makes his voice as a filmmaker apparent via an interesting balance of dark and light. While Lowery’s voice-over unloads a gut wrenching confession of childhood abuse or a straight-from-his-journal serious insight on the dynamics of choosing a more challenging life over death, we watch comic footage of Lowery learning how to spit fire or taunting a squirrel with a peanut on a string. These mash-ups of desperate confession and almost slapstick humor have the potential to perform a weird kind of subversion. Lowry is essentially smuggling his darkest ideas behind his most audience friendly material, and it’s apparently the perfect way to spoon feed complex ideas to a media multi-tasking generation.

Wrist falls squarely into the burgeoning genre of feature-length video diaries. It’s easy (and often tempting) to write this kind of stuff off as a mere bi-product of YouTube culture––there’s a common grumble that it’s less art than an extension of social life––but beyond a massive discrepancy in production value, there’s not that much difference between something like Wrist, and certain films by Alan Berliner and Ross McElwee. What’s most interesting to me about this new wave of diaristic filmmaking is the bravery that often seems to be on display––or, maybe more accurately, the bravado. But the democratic aspect of it––the fact that anyone can make a film like this, of this general quality and of similar content, as Lowery was quick to admit at last night’s Q & A––obviously emboldens the audience to find that same kind of bravery…or to fake it.

At that point, it’s not just that anyone can make a movie because the means of production have become so cheap and attainable, but anyone can make a movie because, with minimal study, they can hit all the right notes of emotional honesty and integrity without actually having to throw a chunk of their guts up on the screen the way Lowery apparently does here. It’s hard not to worry that such accessibility will eventually eat itself.

Tonight: a screening of Shake the Devil Off, and the opening night party. More tomorrow.