Trenton Film Festival

Film festivals don't get more compact than the Trenton FF, which runs a little more than 24 hours.

by Sam Adams

festival

Film festivals don't get more compact than the Trenton FF, which from its opening night to its closing party runs a little more than 24 hours. But from Friday night to Saturday night, the TFF packs in a bevy of shorts by local filmmakers and festival alumni, as well as a handful of noteworthy area premieres.

Documentary characters don't usually get their own spin-offs, but opening night's The Prisoner, or How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair gives the Iraqi journalist Yunis Khatayer Abbas his moment in the sun. Abbas made a memorable appearance in Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein's Gunner Palace, tongue-lashing U.S. troops as they arrested him during a night raid. The Prisoner tells what happened next: Abbas was detained at Abu Ghraib, accused of being a terrorist bomb-maker and set free eight months later with no charges or explanation. The military's silence makes the movie a one-sided (if entirely credible) affair, but the directors do track down one the notorious prison's more amiable guards. With no footage of Abbas' arrest or confinement, the movie fills the gaps with Epperlein's comic book-style illustrations.

Rick Caine and Debbie Melnyk's Manufacturing Dissent (screening Saturday afternoon) gets out the slingshots for Michael Moore. Making its East Coast premiere, the Canadian-made doc accuses Moore of a host of crimes, from dishonesty and fabrication to being an unpleasant boss. As the movie implicitly admits, there's a whole cottage industry devoted to pulling Moore off his pedestal. The difference is that Caine and Melnyk stage their attack from the left, not the right. Their problem is not that Michael Moore hates America, but that he "deserted" Ralph Nader.

The pair score some major hits, providing convincing evidence that Moore did, in fact, score the interview with GM Chairman Roger Smith, whom he spent Roger & Me searching for, but left it out for dramatic purposes. But too many of their brickbats are small potatoes � does anyone care that the alt-weekly Moore ran in the 1980s bilked writer Dave Marsh of his weekly $10 fee? Dissent spends more time attacking Moore's celebrity than it does his filmmaking; its tooth-and-nail account of his rise to the top could be subtitled All About Michael. Marsh, still simmering over his lost ten spots, gets in the movie's most salient point: that in a country with a healthy left, Moore's "milquetoast radicalism" would pass unnoticed.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Trenton Film Festival, Fri.-Sat., May 4-5, various times and locations, $25-$40. Visit www.trentonfilmfest.org for full schedule and ticketing information.