Political films crest at summer festivals

The wave began at Cannes. It must have picked up momentum in the mid-Atlantic, because a tsunami is about to hit Massachusetts shores: political documentaries. At this summer's film festivals, they'll be hitting their targets, making their points, and generally kicking up a lot of sand. Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11," which opens nationally June 25, got all the attention with the Palme d'Or, but in the next few weeks, Bay State festivalgoers can sample several other such provocations, including:

"Weapons of Mass Deception," a scathing look by media watchdog Danny Schechter at how American media outlets packaged the war in Iraq. The film, showing at Nantucket, was motivated by his outrage at how the conflict was covered. "We wouldn't have this war if the media wasn't doing more selling than telling," he says by telephone.

"The Yes Men," also screening at Nantucket, which follows a group of merry pranksters as they gain global renown by impersonating World Trade Organization officials.

"Howard Zinn: You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train," a portrait of the activist, narrated by Matt Damon, that sets the tone early with Zinn's words: "We're taught that if one person kills another person, that is murder, but if a government kills 100,000 people, that is patriotism."

Says Zinn, whose personal modesty hasn't kept him away from the barricades -- or the headlines -- for decades: "It's a little embarrassing to sit in a movie theater and see yourself and your family up on the screen." He'll attend the film's screening in Provincetown. "I guess my hope is that people don't come away thinking it's about me, but thinking it's about being an activist in our time," he adds. "I hope it encourages people to think that to work together on these issues makes life more interesting."

Connie White, Provincetown Film Festival artistic director, sums up the reason for all the political documentaries neatly: "It's an election year and a pivotal time in American history, so there's definitely a lot of voices that want to be heard."

Still, politics may not be everyone's cup of latte, so organizers have lined up dozens of other attractions to tempt the adventurous away from their local air-conditioned cineplex.

At the Provincetown festival, running Wednesday through June 20, the motto is "filmmaking on the edge," says White. "Adventurous, risk-taking, challenging filmmaking is what we're looking for, not things that are very mainstream."

One would expect nothing less in Provincetown, where the drag-and-leather Crown & Anchor club hosts the festival's opening-night party and lovable bad-taste purveyor John Waters returns every year to screen one of his favorite movies.

"Off the Map," a comedy-drama directed by actor Campbell Scott and starring Joan Allen, suits the vibe well, says White. It's the story of an IRS agent who travels to the New Mexico desert for a family's tax-delinquency audit, only to find himself seduced by the family's unconventional ways and the landscape's austere beauty.

"When we screen the film in places that are a little out of the way, naturally beautiful places like Taos and Lake Placid, where people go to be elsewhere, people really recognize the characters, they recognize the feeling of wanting to be self-sufficient," says Scott by phone.

Other films to look for are Brian Dannelly's "Saved!," a comedy about outcasts at a Christian high school starring Jena Malone and Macaulay Culkin (it opened in Boston Friday); Joshua Marston's "Maria Full of Grace," the award-winning tale of a young drug mule; and more than a dozen gay/lesbian-friendly features, including Angela Robinson's "D.E.B.S.," a cross between "Charlie's Angels" and "Austin Powers" featuring schoolgirl secret agents. Jim Jarmusch will accept the festival's Filmmaker on the Edge Award.

Not to be outdone, the Nantucket Film Festival, running Wednesday through June 20, presents its annual screenwriter tribute this year to Charlie Kaufman, the brain-teaser behind "Being John Malkovich," "Adaptation," and this year's "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." "Sunshine" star Jim Carrey and directors Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry will attend the festival, which focuses on the art of screenwriting. Other celebrities expected for events include Cynthia Nixon and Peter Farrelly.

A first-time filmmaker is also likely to get a lot of attention: "Scrubs" star Zach Braff, whose romantic comedy "Garden State" is scheduled for opening night. The film was a crowd-pleaser at Sundance. "It's funny, it's tender, a little soul-searching," says festival director Jill Burkhart.

Braff directs and stars as an actor who returns to his New Jersey hometown from Los Angeles for a funeral, stops taking his antidepressants, and starts thinking about a new life. A Jersey native, Braff wrote the film, too. "I just collected stories from growing up," he says by phone. "It was based on things I experienced, things friends told me about, things I read in the paper."

At the Woods Hole Film Festival, running July 31 through Aug. 8, "we try to put together a lineup that's going to have appeal across the spectrum," says festival president Judy Laster. But partly because of the proximity of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the festival often highlights themes of science and nature.

That's true for the opening-night feature. David Lebrun's award-winning "Proteus," 22 years in the making, blends animation and history to look at the life and work of 19th-century celebrity biologist/artist Ernst Haeckel, who created thousands of images of single-cell sea creatures called radiolaria. "From sea water they absorb silica, and they extrude a skeleton that's like a crystal trellis-work. They're beautiful," Lebrun explains. "They look like Gaudi architecture, or mandalas, or planetary cosmic forms." Lebrun sequenced Haeckel's images in a way that makes the radiolaria seem to evolve and dance. "They do seem in a kind of hallucinatory way to be coming to life," he says.

Other notable films at Woods Hole are the much-anticipated "Bright Leaves," from Harvard's Ross McElwee ("Sherman's March"), a wry autobiographical meditation on the allure of cigarettes by a filmmaker whose great-grandfather created the Bull Durham tobacco brand, and "Monumental: David Brower's Fight for Wild America," Kelly Duane's portrait of the Sierra Club leader.

"The Corporation," a fast-paced documentary that uses humor and psychoanalysis to challenge the very foundation of American big business, shows at both Woods Hole and Provincetown. It just won its seventh festival audience award, says codirector Mark Achbar, but he hopes to do more than entertain. He's looking for "a shift in consciousness that could lead to changes in people's lives," he says by phone. "After seeing it, I have people tell me they want to buy a hybrid car, they want to change the whole way they do business. . . . When something like this comes along and resonates with their own values, it's a very powerful experience."