It’s the last day of the Vancouver International Film Festival, and still the screening that movie people are talking about is that of Operation Filmmaker earlier in the week. If you haven’t heard by now, documentarian Nina Davenport’s politicization of the Project Greenlight formula--here the vaguely talented young hopeful hails from war-torn Baghdad--is a total knockout. But the blows delivered after one of three VIFF screenings are what accounts for the persistent buzz up here.

Among those who defended Davenport against audience accusations that she had exploited and otherwise unduly dissed twentysomething Iraqi playa Muthana Mohmed--a PA on lefty Liev Schreiber’s Everything is Illuminated set--is the Boston Phoenix’s Gerald Peary. After several viewer indictments of Davenport, who’s seen in the film giving money and other support to the reluctantly self-sufficient Mohmed, Peary stood up and said, “Don’t you people understand that this film is a comedy? In Toronto, people were rolling in the aisles! You’re all so serious!”

Neither was knee-jerk political correctness on the agenda of another Davenport fan, Jim Finn, whose own VIFF film La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo (The Shining Trench of Chairman Gonzalo)--something of a Hi-8 La Chinoise--is a thoroughly fascinating, scrupulously provocative mock-doc about young female members of the Shining Path, the Peruvian Maoist revolutionary terrorist group, circa 1989.

“I’m an independent filmmaker,” Finn announced when the Q&A for Operation was threatening to get bloody. “And I can tell you,” he joked, “that we’re all assholes, pretty much.”

# posted by Rob Nelson @ 10/12/2007 06:30:00 PM

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