I spent the weekend at the Traverse City Film Festival, the fifth annual event presided over by Michael Moore in the waterfront town where the filmmaker lives and works in Northern Michigan. Though he and his staff were editing Capitalism: A Love Story across the street from the festival’s main venue around the clock all week, Moore himself introduced nearly every event I attended, including one where he unveiled both a trailer for the almost finished latest film and the entirety of the rarely seen film that gave Moore his first experience in front of a film camera (more on that later). At most of these events, he’d take the stage and talk at length to an entirely adoring crowd, casually making reference to his new film, his reputation and past career, and his future plans. A scoop from the later category: Moore said he’s planning to star in a one-man show on Broadway, presumably along the lines of his 2002 shows at the Roundabout Theater in London, “sometime in the next 24 months.”  He promised to give the show a tryout first at the film festival  — “because if you kill ‘em in Traverse City, you’ll kill ‘em anywhere.”

Outside of Moore’s shadow, Traverse City’s vibe as a festival is along the lines of Telluride and True/False — small town, secret screenings, celebrity/legendary filmmaker guests who blend in with the locals and lesser known attendees while giving each installment of the invent a specific character — but with a dedicated emphasis on comedy. In addition to the panel which I already reported on, in the three days I was in town TCFF hosted an afternoon course on the art of comedy, a preview of the long-anticipated upcoming season of Curb Your Enthusiasm hosted by festival board member Jeff Garlin, and Moore and the festival co-founders handed special prizes to the Funniest Fiction Film and Best Comedy Documentary (to In The Loop and Winnebago Man, respectively), and gave the “Stanley Kubrick Award for Bold and Innovative Filmmaking” to Bob Byington, who was the first director to have two films in the festival — both of them no-frills comedies. I’m not complaining, but one does wonder how Moore’s just-announced comedy festival will actually differ from the film festival in practice.

The full list of TCFF 2009 winners is after the jump.

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