toledoblade.com --

Pop quiz: How quickly could you throw together a film festival in Toledo - a fairly ambitious one, not a Friday the 13th marathon in your rumpus room? One featuring, say, 40-plus documentaries shown in multiple locations across the area, with visiting filmmakers and everything? Don't answer yet: What if you thought the direction of your country was at stake, and that your film festival, no matter how tiny, might play a small role in deciding that fate?

For activist Amjad Doumani and his year-old group, the Media Decompression Collective, the answer is surprising:

Three and a half weeks.

IF YOU GO

Take Back Democracy Film Festival

WHAT: A free series of 40-plus left-leaning political documentaries and shorts shown in multiple locations.

WHEN: Series opens at 7 p.m. tomorrow and continues each week through Oct. 29.

WHERE: Tomorrow's features, Voice From the Movement and Fascists Are Trading Away America, will be shown in the Franciscan Theatre and Conference Center of Lourdes College, 6832 Convent Blvd., Sylvania.

INFORMATION: 419-885-5626 or www.mdctoledo.org.

That's how long it took the group to organize the Take Back Democracy Film Festival, a three-month series of political documentaries and unabashed fiery polemics covering every hot-button topic from the war in Iraq to globalization. Yes, it leans left. (As of late, the right has been curiously unproductive when it comes to political documentaries; meanwhile, objective political documentaries, in this polarized campaign season, have become the rarest of all.)

Three weeks is how long it took to line up more than three dozen documentaries. Three weeks is how long it took to book the church basements, coffeehouses, union halls, pubs, and bookstores across northwest Ohio where the films will be shown. The festival, which is free and open to the public, will cost the group only about $1,000, Mr. Doumani said; the films and the use of most of the venues have been donated, with the Northwest Ohio Peace Coalition putting up some money for expenses like programs and flyers.

Three weeks ago is also, incidentally, when Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 landed in theaters and became, in a single day at the box office, the most successful documentary of all time.

Think of that as the catalyst.

The festival starts tomorrow at the Franciscan Theatre and Conference Center of Lourdes College in Sylvania with two documentaries and two shorts. It runs weekly at various spots around town through October - in fact, right up until Oct. 29.

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That's four days before election day. And that timing, of course, is far from coincidental.

Ohio is a swing state.

Maybe the presidential swing state. And so Mr. Doumani - taking a cue from the scores of political documentaries arriving in the weeks ahead - is capitalizing on a rare moment in movie history: a moment when mainstream audiences seem to be hungry to watch political documentaries.

For example, if you're going to get a crowd to turn out for a documentary called Downwind: Depleted Uranium Weapons in the Age of Virtual War (showing Aug. 5 at the Happy Badger Performing Arts Palace, 1855 South Reynolds Rd.), now's your time.

This year has not been kind to mainstream news outlets. First, a few months before Memorial Day, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released a survey saying only 23 percent of people ages 18 to 29 (a demographic that advertisers slobber after) will get their election-year information from a broadcast news source. According to the survey, these viewers are as likely to get their election-year coverage from Comedy Central's The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update" as from a standard television newscast (or a newspaper, for that matter).

A softer blow was then landed by Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. There's biting truth in Will Ferrell's portrait of a bloated, self-important news anchor who doesn't allow a thing like discernment or reporting to get in the way of journalism. Whatever you type into Ron Burgundy's TelePrompTer, he'll read without a second thought.

The sharpest jab to the self-esteem of broadcast news, though, came from Fahrenheit 9/11. Not because of its tepid criticisms of how the media are covering the war in Iraq, but because it proved a large multiplex audience would pay good money to get information it expects mainstream news to deliver free.

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Mr. Doumani saw his opening. "The best thing about Moore's movie," he said, "is it brought up issues untouched by mainstream news and brought them into a public forum. But we're not going to charge for our screenings because this is information that should be free. It's the information that should be out in the mainstream media. But it's not - so we've become the media."

Sort of.

The Take Back Democracy festival is liberal in its politics but somewhat conservative in its lineup. Many of the films, however well-made and persuasive at times, are fairly predictable: portraits of protesters (Voices From the Movement, tomorrow night); investigations into touch-screen voting (Invisible Ballots, Aug. 31); histories of the connection between big business and oil (Empire and Oil, Aug. 16). That's not to say these aren't worth seeing, only that they're often more comfortable proselytizing and pointing to sinister-looking evidence than doing hard reporting and connecting all of the dots.

And there are gems here, and the best come without any party affiliation attached but rather a sincere outrage over the direction of their democratic institutions: Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election (July 29), Joan Sekler and Richard R. Perez's convincing case for how election-night troubles snowballed into what they consider to be a stolen presidency, faulting everyone from the Supreme Court to Al Gore; The Hidden Wars of Desert Storm (Aug. 12), which shows a pattern of deception, making a provocative case that the United States allowed Saddam Hussein to remain in power so it could retain a presence in the Middle East.

My favorite, though, is What America Needs: From Sea to Shining Sea (Sept. 10). Filmmaker Mark Wojahn hit the road after 9/11 and traveled the country asking everyone he could: What do you think America needs? Their answers - some angry and scared, some hopeful - aren't nearly as important as this invaluable (if scattershot) portrait of a nation still shaking after the attacks.

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Perhaps the best way to think about the Take Back Democracy Film Festival is that it's the world's first chain-letter film festival. The idea came from Sekler, the Los Angeles-based co-director of Unprecedented. Late last year, encouraged by the huge number of political documentaries being produced, but frustrated by the dwindling number of places to see them, she went on a grassroots campaign. She e-mailed peace organizations around the country and art houses and film societies, suggesting they take advantage of these films: She would provide the contact information for the filmmakers, and they would piece together their own version of the festival.

So far, she says, 15 cities have taken her advice and started one. She expects at least 10 more to climb aboard before fall.

"Our window of opportunity greatly increased because of the interest in Fahrenheit 9/11," she said. "This is true. There are something like 800 to 1,000 documentaries produced in this country every year, and only a handful are ever even heard about. I think we owe a lot to Michael Moore for giving these films a presence. But there's so much outrage out there now I think interest in them doesn't have as much to do with him anymore. It has a life of its own."

The Take Back Democracy Film Festival begins tomorrow night and runs weekly through Oct. 29 at various spots across the Toledo area. All screenings are free and open to the public. Information: 419-885-5626 or www.mdctoledo.org.

Contact Christopher Borrelli at: cborrelli@theblade.com
or 419-724-6117.

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