After watching more than ten screenings over the course of three days, my 2006 Wisconsin Film Festival ended Sunday evening with the world premiere of Triviatown. Actually, it was the "unofficial, official world premiere" of the movie, as introduced by co-director Patrick Cady, as it has already won an award at another festival. The documentary was also a big winner in Madison, awarded the Best Wisconsin Film at the Saturday night party. It didn't really have any competition, being the only film eligible for the category, but it was nonetheless a deserving winner.

Triviatown is an exceptionally entertaining documentary about the world's largest trivia contest, a three day and four hour long marathon call-in contest hosted and organized by WWSP, the student radio station for UW-Stevens Point. The Sunday night screening, the second of the festival, was held at the Drury Stage in the Bartell Theatre with nary a seat open. With a good half of this crowd consisting of folks from Stevens Point, including many featured in the movie, it made for quite a fun screening.

While the other documentaries I saw at the festival were all pretty good, Triviatown ranked as excellent, due in large part to its overall coherency as a story. This starts with the subject matter, a trivia contest that includes 11,223 players on 443 teams answering 428 questions over 54 hours. Not only did this provide a wealth of potential source material, enough for 8 camera crews to shoot more than 400 hours of footage, but the pace and suspense inherent to the contest established a ready-made storyline. What the filmmakers did well was to put all of this together into an easily watchable whole.

Ultimately, Triviatown is create a story that is as much about long-term bonds of friendship as it is about the contest. The documentary does this by telling the tale of its 2004, which is dominated by a tight race between two teams: Network, the New York Yankees of the contest with four wins so far this decade; and the Knights of Neek, an up and coming group whose contest is colored by a memories of a lost member to whom the film is dedicated.

Amid this marathon dedicated to the obscure, the filmmakers highlight the persons and the places integral to the nearly four decade old contest. This starts with contest mastermind Jim "The Oz" Oliva and extends to a cast of characters that include the leaders of several of the bigger (and smaller) teams, their teammates, their libraries of periodicals and food wrappers, their banks of networked computers, their seriousness (or not) in playing the contest, and finally, the town of Stevens Point itself. That and the questions, one example given early in the film being the name of the signature on the baseball bat Shelley Duvall used to beat Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Many are far more obscure than this, though, and the questions can be drawn from sources barely imaginable.

This meant that some in the audience were paying particularly close attention to every detail in Triviatown, including members of the team Good Night Irene who were taking notes during the show. The entire crowd was absorbed into the story, laughing, gasping and cheering at the in-jokes, familiar faces, and pot shots that fill the movie. You don't need to be familiar with the contest to understand or appreciate Triviatown, however. All you need is a willingness is to spend a couple of hours watching how delightfully weird people can be.

The 37th annual edition – named The Odd Contest -- is starting on April 7 (that’s this Friday) at the WWSP studios and houses throughout Stevens Point. More information about the history and rules of the contest is available here, while a list of teams can be found here.

Given the excellence of the documentary, not to mention its friendly crowds at the screenings, Triviatown has a good shot at winning the festival's audience award. With an award for Best Documentary at the Westchester Film Festival, and Best Wisconsin Film at this city's festival under its belt, the film should hopefully get a shot at more attention and wider distribution. Triviatown deserves it. Ranking alongside American Movie as a prime example of the new, weird Wisconsin, it stands on its own as a story transcending trivia.