Ode to Kansas

Mark von Schlemmer’s Lawrence, Kansas-based Harvest of the Arts Film Festival has been happily diverse in its dozen years of existence. This year, he has a theme with sharper edges in mind. “I’m getting some things that are more politically minded,” he says.

Like the saying goes, desperate times call for desperate measures. And there’s nothing more desperate than the case of Connie Morris, the Kansas Board of Education’s representative for District 5.

Heading up a number of political shorts is El Jardin, a documentary of Morris’ 2003 effort to stop teaching children she considers the weeds of Garden City. Dissecting her position, filmmakers Ranjit Arab and Aaron Paden of Ganpathi Films show us a naïve administrator with a big mouth and fundamentalist ideals.

Morris says she was asked by God to run for office. And through a smattering of miracles, God helped elect her princess of western Kansas education.

The problem driving this story has its roots in taxes and Kansas’ dysfunctional electoral process. Even though the children’s parents help hold up the state’s economy with their meat-packing jobs — and Morris’ husband is a rancher — she believes these people are sucking away tax dollars that would be better spent paying for elections, such as the one in which she snagged her post. She ran unopposed, not even revealing her platform until after the primary.

In a film world with irrelevant gifts like Matthew Barney’s Cremaster cycle, Arab and Paden’s contribution is a rarity. Its creators are sincere, lacking the vitriol of a weathered Michael Moore or the blinding brevity of Robert DeNiro’s 9/11 vessel.

From the community that brought us In Cold Blood and Sunday liquor bans, El Jardin is as relevant to Kansas history as the home movies from Fred Phelps’ last road trip to Wyoming.