Political Vérité

by Rema Rahman   
Posted February 8, 2008

New Jersey politics is known for being two steps ahead of peculiar (see: McGreevey, Jim). Filmmakers Kristian Fraga and Juan Dominguez capture the weirdness in Anytown, U.S.A., a documentary about the 2003 mayoral campaign in, of all places, Bogota.

Anytown follows a heated three-way race between erstwhile Democratic councilman Fred Pesce and his two legally blind opponents, GOP incumbent Steve Lonegan and Dave Musikant, an Independent who hired Jesse Ventura’s campaign manager. Dominguez, 38, himself a former Bo­gota councilman, and Fraga, 30, of Ridgefield, who has worked in film, are longtime friends. “We captured a microcosm of the American political system,” Dominguez says.

Anytown premiered in New Jersey last spring at the Trenton Film Festival and will soon be distributed nationally. “The issues that you find in this town are universal, like education, taxes, small-town sports,” Fraga says. “Anytime you talk about all that in one movie, you know it’s a going to be a fun-filled night at the cinema.”