A Chicago filmmaker received the award for best documentary at a Missouri film festival this month, but that triumph is the least interesting part of the story she came home to tell. The day before the festival was to begin, the Missouri state government, which had underwritten the festival with a grant of nearly $100,000 in federal stimulus funds, asked for its money back.
State rep Denny Hoskins, a Warrensburg Republican, issued a statement taking credit for rescuing the taxpayers’ money. “A better use of this social service funding,” he asserted, “would be to provide for local families that are in need, instead of creating a red carpet film festival with questionable ethics.”
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The sudden notoriety didn’t help the festival. LaFrenz says the films drew only about 150 people in all. According to Dickens, the audiences at her events were “not at all what they were originally expecting.”
I’ve spent a lot of time on the phone with the leader of the Johnson County Patriots of the Republic, Jeff Merrick, a Warrensburg Baptist pastor. He insists the content of the films in the festival isn’t what made him mad. Warrensburg’s a college town, he reminded me. “We’ve got left and right—if that’s what you’re driving at? We’ve got plenty of liberal views. It’s not like we’re some kind of tucked-away little village that has never heard of these issues. It has nothing to do with that. We didn’t go out and protest the film festival. We didn’t care if the festival went on—and it did. It’s just an improper use of ARRA money.”
“The primary concern for all Americans should be the restraint of our elected leaders under the enumerated powers specified in the Constitution.… Some of our elected representatives treat us like children. Far too many of our politicians insult us in town hall meetings. They dismiss us by refusing to respond to our questions, through the rudeness of their office personnel, and by giving us meaningless responses that answer none of our concerns. All of these actions make it clear that they no longer take us, the people, seriously.”
The blows didn’t all fall on the festival. At the Show Me Progress blog, Michael Bersin, a professor of music at Central Missouri, charted the antics of the opposition under the heading “Suppose you held a film festival and right wingnuts didn’t want anyone to attend.” Jack Miles, editor of the Daily Star-Journal, accused Hoskins and Kinder of “selective scrutiny” of public expenditures, pointing out that Kinder had never had a problem with spending millions of the taxpayers’ dollars to support his favorite event, the annual Tour of Missouri bicycle race, which the Democratic governor eventually canceled. As for the “questionable ethics” Hoskins managed to perceive in the film festival, Miles wondered what they were. Everything it did, Miles wrote, was done “in good faith, with permission and transparently.” In which case, “how ethical, how irresponsible, how plain dumb, really, is it that after months of planning by Missouri Valley, Social Services yanked festival funding less than 17 hours before the event started?”
Missouri Valley had it covered. “What is the expected outcome (change in the problem)?” the application asked. And the agency answered, “The outcome will be that a social and economic justice film festival is held in Missouri to educate the general public and create awareness of the real picture of poverty in Missouri.”
