Filmmaking as spiritual practice and ministry

Cross Currents, Spring, 2004 by Macky Alston

Imagine this: for two years you have been filming a minister with cancer. She is convinced she has a long prophetic ministry ahead of her. She believes that, for God, anything is possible and, because she has this sense of call, she is sure to lick her cancer. As the months tick by, you film her speaking with power and faith from this place of pain, confusion and suffering. And then she dies. It appears that she was wrong, that her call was cut short. You edit your film. It is watched on television by millions in the U.S. and abroad. You tour with the film and listen to this minister speak from beyond the grave to the widest range of audiences. The tour continues. The film is rebroadcast to this day. She was not wrong. Her ministry is alive and well, thanks to your work.

Imagine this: you have been making a film for three years hand-to-mouth, believing that God wants you to make it and that God will help you do so against all odds. You have borrowed all you can. Your crew of eight has been alerted and knows that the project will shut down if money doesn't show up in the next 24 hours. You cannot sleep. You cannot speak. You have played your hand. In your mailbox that evening, you find a check with no attached note from a movie star you solicited as a joke. The check is for exactly the amount you need to proceed.

And imagine this: you are showing a film about the faltering and flowering faith lives of a handful of New Yorkers--an African American Muslim, an atheist Jew, a gay Christian, a born-again Buddhist--at a rural college to an audience of one thousand white Lutheran teenagers from church youth groups across the state of Minnesota. You are asking yourself how it is that your film was chosen for this audience. You are wondering what kind of vegetables they have prepared to throw. Discussion is rich after the film, which feels like an act of grace, but the breathtaking conversations happen after most of the audience has left: with the boy who until that moment was convinced he was going to hell for being gay; the girl who was convinced she was crazy for having lost her faith; the gaggle of blond children who had never met a Muslim, had only seen them as terrorists in the movies and on the news, and, until your film, had been convinced they were plain evil.

Making and presenting a documentary is, in my experience, a religious experience. At a screening last week at Harvard Divinity School of my last documentary, Questioning Faith: Confessions of a Seminarian, a woman in the audience asked if documentary filmmaking is a spiritual practice. I had never called it such, but as I began to reflect on the process of making a documentary film--of tracking down the sacred in everyday life, sifting through hours of footage for truth and meaning, and then holding it up for the world to appreciate--I knew it to be so. In Questioning Faith, I explore how people reconcile faith with suffering and, in the course of the film, as I witness the heroic power of people to choose life in the face of death, I move in my own beliefs from great doubt to deep faith. The woman in the audience likened that movement to Job's articulation of his conversion to faith: "I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eyes see you." I have indeed found filmmaking, the act and art of seeing, to be a profound spiritual practice.

Filmmaking is not easy and confronts one with constant ethical challenges. It is hard to justify spending so much money on some idea you think might be good, but you know might not be. The moral quagmires are endless and ultimately impossible to escape clean. You observe people in your films believing that, by participating in a film, their lives will be transformed--that the film will make them stars, right the wrongs of their past, end the isolation they have known for decades. You know that all you can manage is to do your best to be kind and tell their stories responsibly, but you see how your films do change people's lives--their stature in their communities and their sense of self--and it's not always for the better. You see the ugliness in yourself. You harbor secret hope for dramatic twists in lives and history that will make your film come to life, often to the detriment of the people being filmed. You pray for guidance, and pray also that at the end of the day, their fates are not in your hands, but in God's. Or at least I do.

In the best of all worlds, making documentary films makes you more honest--it forces you into worlds and situations you might never have known. You might live with a poor Muslim family in Harlem for a year. You might tell your Victorian grandmother you are gay on film after a lifetime of nuanced mutual deception.

And documentaries can change the world. The history of documentary is in large part the history of trying to make films that make a difference. Whether the topic is war and peace, corporate corruption, immigration, racism, homelessness, and most recently a McDonald's diet, there are countless films that have served as the catalyst to changes of heart and of policy.