Over the past two weeks, the eyes of the entertainment world have focused on Canada and the 37th annual Toronto International Film Festival. The eyes of American taxpayers, however, should’ve been fixed on wasteful lawmakers who are busy robbing them blind to subsidize outlandish film festivals here at home.
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) received $146.2 million from federal taxpayers this year to bankroll a myriad of artists and arts projects. A major emphasis of the NEA’s spending in recent years has been subsidizing film festivals. Judging by the long list of film festivals that taxpayers funded this year, it seems like no film festival is too small or too bizarre to receive a government handout.
For example, the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival received $10,000 in tax money, as did the South Asian International Film Festival in San Francisco. Rather than relying on the wealthy residents and visitors of Martha’s Vineyard to underwrite the cost of the Martha’s Vineyard International Film Festival, the event’s organizers forced taxpayers to pick up part of the tab.
The 2012 Environmental Film Festival was held from March 13-25 in Washington, DC. Among the films screened at the green movie gala using an NEA grant funded with taxpayers’ greenbacks was a documentary with the gall to criticize a car company for bringing jobs and economic prosperity to a poor village in the Czech Republic. Predictably, the hackneyed hippie film fest also featured no fewer than five flicks vilifying the oil industry.
Perhaps the most outrageous film festival taxpayers will fund this year is the New Orleans Film Festival. Among the gems screened at last year’s edition of the festival were “Barracuda,” a movie in which a phone sex operator drives her Plymouth Barracuda across the country to exact vigilante justice on various perverts, and “Moon Pie,” a short film that follows a man’s journey through his double-wide as he accuses family members of eating his last Moon Pie.