Until that time, she'd spent her organizing time on the ground, in the day-to-day struggle to get people working for justice and peace.
Then she saw a documentary film's coalescing effect while rallying young people for a United Nations session on disarmament.
“What it illuminated for me was how all sorts of people, with all their flaws, could come together to make a difference,” Trent said Wednesday while visiting Missoula to show some of her work. “What I saw was that instead of working in each little town, I could work in the larger picture, and serve as a vehicle for people to make a difference.”
Her first major film was “Destination Nicaragua,” which chronicled Americans who paid witness to the U.S. government's backing of the Contras in the civil war with the Sandinistas, who enjoyed the popular support of their country.
That film perfectly positioned Trent and her partner, David Kasper, when the Iran-Contra scandal broke.
“We had all the relationships with former CIA officers and people all over the country,” said Trent, whose Missoula visit is sponsored by the Jeannette Rankin Peace Center, various groups from the University of Montana and the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences.
She showed her new film, “Soldiers Speak Out,” at the Roxy on Wednesday night, and is set to screen “Coverup: Behind the Iran-Contra Affair” on Thursday at 7:30 p.m. in the UC Theater.
The film that really brought Trent and Kasper to national prominence was “The Panama Deception,” a controversial look at the 1989 invasion of that Central American country.
The government claimed the invasion was called for to depose drug-and-weapons-dealing dictator Manuel Noriega, but Trent's film pointedly stated that America was really interested in destabilizing the country in an effort to maintain control over the Panama Canal.
The film, released in 1992, won the Academy Award for documentaries and served as a point of action for Panamanians.
“It opened the eyes of people there in Panama that our government hadn't been an honorable partner,” Trent said. “It showed them that the word of the U.S. government wasn't necessarily to be trusted.”
It was not without a sense of familiarity that Trent and Kasper went to work on their latest film, “Soldiers Speak Out,” a short documentary that focuses on the experience of soldiers who fought in Iraq.
“It's basically the same thing all over again,” Trent said. “Anchormen saying the same thing about terrible dictators who are a threat to American security. It's the same lies, the same use of fear to make the invasion of yet another country acceptable.”
Unlike some of Trent's movies, which drive their points home with narration, “Soldiers Speak Out” uses only the voices of American veterans.
“Too often, when soldiers come back from war, they don't want to talk about what they've been through,” Trent said. “So their experience starts to disappear, and it becomes possible for the next generation to be ripe for military propaganda. We want people to talk and that's what this film does - lets people talk.”
Trent wishes for a world where she wouldn't be exposing the lies of her own government, but sees her work as an act of patriotism.
“It makes me sad to expose the government as deceitful, but countries we've invaded need to know that it's not the American people who are doing these things.”
Reporter Michael Moore can be reached at 523-5252 or at mmoore@missoulian.com.
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