08/11/2006

Friends forever

Lots of winners at Film Festival

By MARTA HEPLER DRAHOS

mdrahos@record-eagle.com

Record-Eagle/Douglas Tesner
Film-goers bustle by in front of the busy State Theatre last week. Now that the festival is over, organizers are beginning to make plans for 2007.

For a complete list of Film Festival awards, click here

TRAVERSE CITY — Carole and Patrick Brady waited until closing day of the Traverse City Film Festival to join the festival's new "friends" group.

Their strategy paid off when they were randomly selected for a lifetime pass to the festival at its closing night party.

"We couldn't believe it," said Patrick Brady, 61, a legal editor for LexisNexis, which provides products and services for legal, business, academic and government professionals. "I guess we're going to have to take some vacation time."

Carole Brady, 55, said the Elk Rapids couple donated $50 to become founding members of the group and purchase tickets to next year's festival a week before the general public. They picked up the membership form at last Friday's showing of "An Inconvenient Truth" and returned the completed form at the Sunday screening of "Paradise Now" — about six hours before the Grand Prize Drawing deadline. The films were among three they saw at this year's festival.

"We would have liked to have gone to a lot more, but work was an inconvenient truth," Patrick Brady said.

Other winners in the drawing were: Tim Bloomquist of Traverse City, a trip for two to a Los Angeles or New York movie premier; Bernadine Dosch of Grayling, a day on the set with festival founder and award-winning filmmaker Michael Moore; Lisa Myers of Lake Ann, Karen Guth of Elk Rapids, Mimi Gass of Glen Arbor and Petra Kuehnis and Steve Duede, both of Traverse City, a 2007 festival pass.

The second annual festival ended the same way as the first — with a special screening billed as "Mike's Surprise." This year the event featured a film on Moore's 2004 Slacker Uprising Tour, in which he visited 60 cities in 20 battleground states in an attempt to get millions of traditional non-voters to the polls for the Nov. 2 presidential election.

"There was some filming going on but nobody had ever put anything together," said Terri Hardesty, a festival media relations coordinator who was Moore's publicist for the tour. "It had never been seen before."

Hardesty said the footage received a warm reception from those who paid $7 to be surprised.

"The audience was cheering and clapping," she said.

Festival awards were announced before the 7 p.m. closing night screening of "Scoop" at the State Theatre. In a tie, Moore and festival co-founders John Robert Williams and Doug Stanton gave their Founders Prize to the films "Men at Work, "Son of Man" and "Road to Guantanamo."

The audience prize, determined by online voting, went to "Viva Zapatero!," "Little Miss Sunshine" and "Air Guitar Nation." Other awards included the 'Splain Award (for why this film wasn't brought to Traverse City before) to "Prizewinner of Defiance, Ohio"; Best Use of the Words "Traverse City" in a Feature Film to "Winter Passing" and Scariest Film Award to "Jesus Camp."

Directed by Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, the latter film follows children at an evangelical summer camp in North Dakota. It was rumored in an Aug. 1 Washington Post column to have been pulled from the festival by distributor Mangolia Pictures because it feared association with Moore could drive away conservative and evangelical audiences.