Gideon Burton's Blog

LDS Film Festival 2008 (part 5): The Errand of Angels

The Errand of Angels is the first film entirely about female Mormon missionaries, and director Christian Vuissa--founder of the LDS Film Festival--gets the sub-genre off to a vigorous start with a visually stunning and thoroughly engaging tale of sister missionaries at work in Austria.

Giving authenticity to the film is co-producer Heidi Johnson, whose own missionary experiences were the basis of the film. Mormon cinema fans will recognize the talents of Erin Chambers (The Singles 2nd Ward) and Rachel Emmers (States of Grace), both of whom put a beautiful face on sister missionary work with their vivacity and earnestness.

LDS Film Festival 2008 (part 4): Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons

In a telling interview in Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons, a woman named Tamu admits she doesn't mind explaining her religious faith to blacks, but she does mind explaining her race to fellow Mormons. This documentary is serving both purposes. It dares to show black audiences that African-Americans have embraced Mormonism from the beginning and have stayed and grown in their faith in Christ despite mistreatment inconsistent with Christianity or Mormonism's own egalitarian principles. And the documentary also dares to show to Mormons the high cost of their racism and the flimsiness of those rationalizations (sometimes propagated from the top) that kept black Latter-day Saints from the full blessings of church membership for a century.

LDS Film Festival 2008 (part 3): Wrestling with God

"Wrestling with God" is one of the reasons I go to a film festival. This 22-minute "conversational drama" was not your typical movie, and I applaud its three producers and three actors for having the guts to do something completely outside the mold but inside the heart of Mormonism. (Pictured here is one of the actors, Niki Nielsen). As the producers/directors explained it afterwards, the origin of the film was a deep conversation they'd had about what it means to live the Mormon faith. Someone had the presence of mind to make a recording of this (which was then transcribed into a draft of the screenplay). Whoa! All I can say is that I'd love to have these people over to chat at my house!

LDS Film Festival 2008 (part 2): Happy Valley

All 700 of us raised our hands. All of us who had just seen Happy Valley, the documentary about drug abuse in Utah that screened at the LDS Film Festival last night. Filmmaker Ron Williams simply asked during the Q&A if someone close to us had a drug abuse problem. We are mostly Utahns and mostly Mormons and yes, our friends and family members suffer from the blight of drug abuse. It was sobering.

I have a great respect for films and filmmakers using the medium to address serious issues. I saw it two years ago with the sobering film Propensity, reaching out to the suicidal, and last year with Samuel Adams' early-return missionary doc, Returning With Honor (about which I've previously blogged). You can tell the difference between this sort of films and others because the discussion after the festival screenings is not about distribution or film careers but about reaching out to those suffering.

LDS Film Festival 2008 (part 1): Forever Strong

Ryan Little's new feature film, Forever Strong, gave a strong opening to the 7th annual LDS Film Festival last night (1/16/08), with a crowd of some 700 in the SCERA center's Xango Grand Theatre in Orem, Utah. Last year Little brought Hollywood-level production values to the festival with his Outlaw Trail, and Forever Strong shows a strong upward trajectory for one of Mormon cinema's finest young directors.

An inspirational sports film that one might compare to Remember the Titans, We are Marshall, or even Hoosiers, Forever Strong is based on the Highland High School rugby team in Salt Lake City presided over for decades by real-life coach Larry Gelwix. Gelwix, played ably by Gary Cole, is interested in building character as much as winning, and he is gradually able to win over and spiritually reform the troubled lead, player Rick Penning (played by Sean Faris). Sean Astin plays a minor role, but gives the film a sense of its own center with some leftover shine from his own inspirational sports film 15 years ago, Rudy.

Mormon Studies Conferences in 2008

Mormons are being studied by more than Mitt Romney pundits. Here are some academic conferences happening that I know of this year (2008):

Screening Scripture: Inevitable Embellishment

This still, from the first movie made about The Book of Mormon in 1915 (the Clawsons' First Nephi) shows Sariah mourning for her four sons who have not returned from a dangerous journey back to Jerusalem--the city from which the rejected prophet Lehi and his family were fleeing. The scriptural record is poignant but sparse, stating only that upon the sons' return their mother "was exceedingly glad, for she truly had mourned because of us" (1 Nephi 5:1).

The full image shows Sariah's husband, Lehi, standing above her and comforting her, but this is cropped to emphasize something my student Katherine Morris pointed out in my Mormons and Film class on 1/10/08, that the parents' daughters are shown comforting their mother, something the scriptural text certainly doesn't state occurred. It is probable, however, and so this embellishment to the scriptural account isn't likely to raise objections.

Mormon Film Festival in Brussels, "Festival du Film Mormon"

I was pleased to discover that in February 2008 a Mormon Film Festival (not to be confused with the upcoming LDS Film Festival in Orem, Utah, January 16-19, 2008) will be held in Brussels, Belgium, organized by Claude Andre Bernard, a lecturer in the Communications department of a college in Brussels (VUB), and a member of the church's public affairs committee for Brussels. In communication with me he expressed his interest in using the festival to raise the profile of the church in Europe. The official website is http://www.artistesmormons.org/.

Course at BYU in Mormons and Film

I've just been approved to teach a course this Winter semester (Jan-April, 2008) in BYU's Theatre and Media Arts department entitled "Mormons and Film: The First Century" (click on image to the left for full-sized flier). The online syllabus can be found here. I'm very excited about this. I'm adapting Randy Astle's syllabus from a few years back, adding to it readings from the special issue of BYU Studies on Mormons and Film that he and I edited for 2007.

There is so little knowledge about the history of Mormons and film, and there are so many interesting and important films (whether by or about Mormons--see the Mormon Literature & Creative Arts database which tallies some 4000 such films). This course will help to promote Mormon cinematic cultural literacy and hopefully spark some good research and criticism about these largely unstudied works.

New film by T.C. Christensen

T.C. Christensen, noted LDS filmmaker (pictured here a bit younger than he is today. See his filmography), premiered a new film tonight at the north visitor's center at Temple Square in Salt Lake City, Only a Stonecutter: The Story of John Rowe Moyle. This 15-minute film, starring veteran LDS actor Bruce Newbold, gives the history of this British convert who lived in Alpine, Utah and for 20 years walked the 22 miles to Salt Lake City each week (leaving at 2 am to arrive at 8 am) to carve the granite on that growing edifice (the last years of his life doing so on a prosthetic leg). It is a brief story of one of the supporting saints in church history, and I hope it will prove a new genre of historical films focused on everyday men and women who in their own small ways showed great faith and built the kingdom.