Filmmaker Jeff Reichert is writer and director of an upcoming documentary about redistricting. That’s something you don’t hear every day.

True, people who watch politics for a living know the urgency of redistricting, the state-by-state redrawing of congressional and legislative lines following each decade’s census to adjust for population changes over the previous 10 years. And true political junkies are fascinated by the back stories of redistricting — the self-dealing, double-dealing, partisan and personal revenge and bizarrely designed districts that provide drama and occasional moments of comedy to the process.

Then there’s the other 99 percent or so of the American population, for whom redistricting is one of those obscure political process issues that make their eyes glaze over.

But Reichert is not deterred by the fact that redistricting is not exactly known as popcorn fare. Asked why he picked such an esoteric topic as the subject for a movie, and he’ll tell you it’s just that important – because how the lines are drawn following the 2010 elections will set the tone for the nation’s partisan debates, and can affect which party has the upper hand in American politics, for an entire decade.

“The point of the film is bringing voters to the point that they recognize they should be aware of the process because it does affect them in a very direct way,” said Reichert, whose film, in production for release next year, is called “Gerrymandering.” It takes its name from the epithet for exotically drawn political maps that dates to 1812, when Massachusetts Gov. Elbridge Gerry signed a remap that packed opposition party voters into a single district that critics said was shaped like a salamander.

Reichert said he doesn’t have a definite release date for the film yet. But he plans to have it out in time to draw attention to the fact that the 2010 midterm elections for governors’ offices and legislative seats, being held in most states, will determine whether the redistricting that will follow is controlled by one party or split between the Democrats and the Republicans.

“It has to be in advance of the 2010 elections by enough of a margin that people are thinking about the redistricting process and the implications of the redistricting process well enough in advance of when they go to the polls and think about who they are going to vote for and who they are going to put in charge of their state legislatures,” Reichert said.

Part of the film’s mission is educational, Reichert noted, with its centerpiece an animation he calls Gerrymandering 101 that explains the process.

But he hopes to bring the subject to life with vignettes, collected in travels across the country, that illustrate how the die cast by redistricting affects how we govern and are governed for an extended period of time.

Reichert said his interest in the topic was piqued by the one recent redistricting battle that got a lot of national press: The effort in 2003 by Texas Republicans, who had captured control of the state legislature, to alter a redistricting map that already had been put in place for the 2002 election. It is widely believed that this rare mid-decade redistricting was masterminded by Tom DeLay, the fiercely partisan representative of a suburban Houston district who then was the powerful majority leader of the U.S. House.

The Republicans ultimately had their way, producing a remap that turned a 17-15 Democratic edge into a 21-11 GOP advantage after the 2004 elections (the delegation today is split 20 Republicans and 12 Democrats). But they succeeded only after the Democrats had stalled through some extreme tactics to prevent the legislature from securing the necessary quorums to act on the redistricting measure: Democratic state senators fled to New Mexico for a month at one point, while dozens of state House Democrats holed up at another point in a Holiday Inn across the state border in Ardmore, Okla.

Reichert and his camera crew went on location to that Ardmore hotel, which he describes as “the most utterly banal place to stage a major democratic protest.”

His adventures also included a trip to south Florida, to illustrate how redistricting can produce lawmakers with mixed priorities. He followed Democratic state Sen. Dave Aronberg, from the evocatively named city of Greenacres, whose district spans the peninsula from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, taking in a variety of urban, suburban and rural environs along the way.