Filmgoers, filmmakers inspired by breadth and depth of second festival”s offerings

Carl Lumbly promised in 2006 he would bring Danny Glover to Mendocino for a special award in 2007 if the Mendocino Film Festival could overcome the odds and roll the tape on a second year.

Lumbly was emcee of the awards ceremony at “Take 2” on Saturday and ate some crow on behalf of friend Glover, before congratulating locals for a volunteer effort that was longer on the substance and shorter on the glitz this year.

“The first year is easy. The film gods let you have one year,” Lumbly said.

Mendocino was packed with filmgoers who couldn”t get enough of nearly 100 films played over four days.

“For me this is a wonderful orgy of film once a year. I can”t afford it the rest of the year,” said coast resident Miles Everett.

Wayne Jonas, M.D., had seen dozens of movies by Saturday night.

“That only makes me want to rent all the ones I didn”t get a chance to see,” said Jonas, who was pleased that the local festival seems to be getting to be the place to come to with documentaries and films about activism. He worried that some of the higher budget films that arrived this year could even distract from the serious message.

Lumbly, star of TV”s “Alias” and an actor with a long list of credits such “Men of Honor,” starring alongside Cuba Gooding Jr. and Robert DeNiro, promised he would keep bringing the award back as long as Mendocino could put on a festival and one of these years Glover would be there to receive it.

A newspaper reporter who fell in love with the stage while on assignment, Lumbly was once again the top star. But this year there was no Sydney Pollack or other famous directors. The guest of honor was Albert Maysles, a pioneer in documentary filmmaking whose work included “What”s Happening,” about the Beatles” arrival in America.

The lack of big names from behind the camera may have had something to do with the fact that the Cannes Film Festival, the world”s most prestigious, was held the same weekend as the Mendocino Film Festival.

This year”s festival featured an even larger percentage of documentaries and movies about activism.

“Everything”s Cool” producer Chris Pilaro said the trail Michael Moore blazed and Al Gore widened has created more interest at film festivals and not just in an activist area like Mendocino.

For those accustomed to Hollywood productions, the perspectives and ideas would have been unfamiliar.

The Toxic Comedy Pictures production “Everything”s Cool” used humor to illustrate why Americans don”t get global warming, offering Letterman-like views of the public, such as an angry man saying global warming is “un-American.”

The movie documents a disinformation campaign by petroleum interests and efforts by investigative journalist Ross Gelbspan to present the real science. Gelbspan gets more and more frightened by what global warming will do to his children and grandchildren.

The film illustrates how the American media”s sacred doctrine of objectivity and balance can be misused when there really aren”t two sides to an issue.

The festival”s films weren”t all serious. “The Great Mojado Invasion,” directed by Gustavo Vazquez and Guillermo Gomez-Pena, was an off-the-wall look at the imminent U.S.-Mexican “war” featuring naked, rumpled men in sombreros and a serious message of who really are the people feared by demagogues.

“That”s the closest thing we have to an X-rated film,” said Jim Culp, at the awards ceremony. Culp was chairman of the judges. Seven people spent three months watching nearly 1,000 submissions to winnow the field down to nearly 100 films.

The final choices offered something unique, entirely different than anything Hollywood aims to produce.

Everett said the reason the diversity of perspective has disappeared from the movie theater even as budgets and bullets have increased is that corporate America now selects the movies solely for their ability to gross.

“I remember when movies came with a cartoon, a short feature and then the movie. Now it is just a bunch of ads and then the movie,” he said.

Resident Annemarie Weibel said America”s endless obsession with celebrity gossip and fluff means people don”t know what is really happening in the world — like the localization movement.

“Ripe for Change,” directed by Emiko Omori, showed how Mendocino County has pioneered ideas of local control in a corporate world, such as the anti-GMO vote and efforts at community localization.

Formula films and sequels were rare at the festival but “Global Focus III” was both — with unexpected twists. The formula is filming — and empowering one environmental activist on each continent and combining them into segments narrated by Robert Redford. A Chinese man who formed a watershed conservation area and stopped dams from being built ended up cruising down the Amazon with activists who slowed predatory logging at risk of their lives.

Reel Mendo

At Reel Mendo, which focused on locally produced films, there was no formula and many surprises, not all of them thrilling.

Kay Rudin submitted a half dozen films but was thrilled her “Viva Judi Bari,” which drew a big crowd of locals to Mendocino High School, which was the most comfortable of the five mini theater venues used.

The celebration of timber activist Bari was followed by “Return,” made by Damani Baker in Africa. The documentary follows a Harlem man”s efforts to study traditional African medicine. It features only black people, but an amazing array of “characters” including doctors, politicians, medicine men and sociologists.

The Harlem student is told by a local guide he resembles “a South Dakota tourist in Harlem.” African medicine is under attack by the global scientific community, who have said in news stories that belief in traditional cures has contributed to the spread of AIDS. But the film takes the viewer inside a continent where Western medicine is still largely unavailable and manages to show the reader how Western values, such as anything for profit, come with Western medicine. Baker succeeds in showing the belief that much of the sickness of the world comes from people who are out to conquer and pollute.

The incongruity of the local films continued with a political film, “High Crimes and Atrocities,” documenting the case for impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney.

While watching the next local film, “4U,” a gory 5-minute black and white artsy movie showing a killer chopping up bodies, the spectator next to this reporter in the darkened theater said she found “Hacking Democracy” the winner in the terror genre, as the movie showed just how easy voting machines could be tampered with.

Unique views

The festival was full of movies telling stories mostly outside the universe of mainstream society.

One place society rarely wants to look is into the world of the mentally ill, but that is the viewpoint of “Revolving Door,” directed by Chuck and Marilyn Braverman. The film follows Tommy Lennon, youthful, attractive and likeable, through his world fogged by delusion and mania. Tommy”s mental illness followed a head injury, illustrating how thin the line between the “normal” and shunned can be.

Another film, “Jonas,” directed by Elias Daughdrill, told the story of a schizophrenic who has no place in the world and finds the tag of his illness to be how others define him.

There were also unique views on religion and spirituality.

A favorite of many of the hard core movie fans was “Soul Searching.” The documentary on 20th-century mystic Thomas Merton was shown in the dauntingly crowded parish hall at St. Anthony”s Catholic Church. The 90-minute film covered Fr. Merton”s search for meaning and his extraordinary influence on Catholic clergy and Laity alike. His book, “The Seven-Storey Mountain,” was responsible for hundreds of men joining the Trappist order in the 1950s.

“Soul Searching”s” companion film, the 15-minute “Awakening Universe,” made the argument that since all the universe came from the “big bang,” all of life is related, and we should care for the planet because our own future depends on what we do now. Gorgeous Hubble-style space photos and a rapid-fire montage of “civilization” brought the point across in moving fashion.

But special effects weren”t what this festival was all about.

Lumbly praised the most spectacular special effect at the festival — the frugality. In the first year, the festival borrowed its award tent from a couple who was getting married the next day at the MacCallum House. The 2007 event was all volunteer, which impressed Lumbly and the dozens of visiting directors and producers.

Many directors and producers said they flocked to the festival as much for the inspiring “set” of the Mendocino Coast as for the plot of the film festival. They said they believed that is what will make this festival succeed in the long run where others have failed.