Filed under: Everything Else, Documentary, Film Festivals, Silverdocs
JESUS CAMP by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady
Driving along a middle-American road lined with fast food restaurants and gas stations, a conflict is introduced via radio—President Bush announces that Sandra Day O’Conner has just resigned from the Supreme Court; the station changes and a Christian evangelist proclaims that now is the time to reclaim America for Christ.
Next we are at a meeting of evangelicals led by Becky Fisher, a Pentecostal children’s minister. Becky invites the children to come to a summer camp. Before camp begins, the film follows three precocious alpha-children who become main characters along with Becky herself. Becky talks a bit about why she ministers to children: “they are so open, they are so usable in Christianity,” she says, “I want to see young people as committed to Jesus Christ as they are to Islam.”
At camp, the children sing songs about Jesus, speak in tongues, and are introduced to some of the major political questions of our time from an evangelical perspective. The kids cry for aborted babies and learn that according to the Old Testament, Harry Potter should have been put to death. The children evangelize themselves, imploring strangers at a bowling alley or in the park to accept Jesus. One child preacher proclaims “I really feel that we are a key generation to Jesus coming back.”
The film is truly eye-opening for those of us who have lived our lives on either coast and rarely encounter members of the 30 million strong American evangelical movement. The most striking element is the real passion and fervor of these children, which is visible in their faces and audible in their eloquent words. The depth of their faith is clear.
Credits for this film go almost entirely to talented women. The cinematography is intimate and skillful, the editing tight and clean, if a bit heavy-handed. The directors, who explained in the Q&A that they didn’t know any born-again Christians before this, managed to maintain an open rapport with their characters while allowing the audience to laugh at them, an impressive feat. In fact, they explained, the characters feel that the film is helping them get out their message about Jesus Christ.
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Other Silverdocs Coverage
I’m still processing all of the films and talks that I attended at Silverdocs and while digging around in the blogosphere found some other blog reports on the festival, incluicng Lauren Feeney’s report on Al Gore’s keynote address, which I…
Trackback by the chutry experiment 06.19.06 @ 10:29 pmLeave a comment
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I like your read on “Jesus Camp” quite a bit. I was raised as an evaneglical, and many of the images were rather familiar to me (luckily my parents aren’t extremists and I attended public schools where I made a more informed decision about my beliefs).
The filmmakers really capture the intensely emotional aspects of the culture nicely. I’m somewhat ambivalent about the structuring device of the Air America host. I know that he is a Christian and is meant to counter the conservative ideology of most evangelicals, but I’m not sure whether it works or not. His sequences were beautifully filmed, however.
Comment by Chuck 06.19.06 @ 9:44 pm