Mr. Christian Goes to Sundance

Part 1 of an exclusive 3-part series on the Sundance Film Festival, an event that's increasingly shaping the way popular movies are made.

The crowd hushed as David Schwimmer's lanky, familiar frame ambled down the theater aisle. After 10 years of Friends, it was surreal watching him do something so normal. Though some actors' "real world" appearance is vastly different from their characters', Schwimmer's attire and demeanor matched Ross'.

I waited to hear what he would say about the starring role he played in the movie my wife and I had just seen, Duane Hopwood. As I did, I couldn't help but notice how his presence electrified the audience.

Welcome to Sundance.

Jennifer and I had pulled into Park City, Utah—swank home of the United States' most prestigious independent film festival—a few hours earlier. After unpacking, we rendezvoused at a local church with 60 film and theology students. For five days, we would all feast our eyes on as many movies as our minds could handle and discuss what we saw with professors from Biola University and Fuller Theological Seminary. (The students received college credit; my wife, a Fuller grad, helped teach. I was there to report.)

Craig Detweiler, the teacher, filmmaker and author who led our sessions, challenged us to look for God's fingerprints in the films we would see. As he talked, a mixture of excitement and apprehension gripped me. I confess I was looking forward to rubbing shoulders with the rich and the famous. But I also wondered how much the movies we would we see might attack our convictions. In recent years, Hollywood has been better at trashing Christianity than at producing nuanced portrayals of people of faith. Would the independent films we were slated to see do any better?

Getting Acclimated
Like John Bunyan's protagonist, Christian, in A Pilgrim's Progress, I found myself a stranger in a strange land, curious, hopeful ... and a bit intimidated. After class orientation the first night, Jennifer and I headed out to see Schwimmer's Duane Hopwood.

I'd always pictured Sundance as a compact event with multiple theaters situated in close proximity to one another. Instead, movie venues were scattered all over Park City. To get to each film, we trudged across snow-packed sidewalks, waited for city buses and looked at the city map—a lot.

I didn't know it at the time, but Duane Hopwood set the tone for the week. I empathized with Schwimmer's character, a struggling alcoholic desperately seeking to salvage broken relationships with his ex-wife and two daughters. The drama has occasional comedic moments, but it is a long way from the consequence-free zone that was Friends. Instead, a severely damaged man grapples with the reality of how his addiction has destroyed his family. Similarly, many of the films we saw later in the week dealt head-on with equally hard subjects—including faith and suffering.

Reel to Real
Twice a day between these cinematic excursions we gathered to dialogue about what we had observed. Those conversations proved as stimulating as the films themselves, as the participants in the class talked about what they'd seen and what (if any) spiritual threads they'd identified.

One film that provoked a lot of discussion was The Education of Shelby Knox, a documentary about a Christian girl in a public high school who becomes an unlikely champion for comprehensive sex education in Lubbock, Texas. Shelby is genuinely concerned for her sexually active peers, and believes that the abstinence-only curriculum of her school system fails to deal with the reality of contemporary teens' sexual practices.

Back in class, the students engaged in a spirited exchange about how a documentary filmmaker's bias influences her treatment of the individuals she interviews. I, along with several others, struggled to sift the positive from the not-so-positive in this movie as it alternated between portraying Shelby's faith (and her parents') sympathetically and caricaturing other Christians as simpleminded, mean-spirited and anachronistic. We also talked about how the language we use as Christians often fails to connect with those we most hope to influence—something the film painfully details.

Sundown
Five days. Ten feature films. Twenty shorts. Fifteen hours of classroom conversation. The bottom line? We left Park City with a bigger sense of what was happening in the independent film world—and how God might be involved—than we had when we arrived.

It almost goes without saying that I didn't agree with (or even like) everything I saw. But I did sense that many of today's independent filmmakers are focusing their lenses on important stories and themes as they seek to change the world through their movies. That's something I wasn't prepared for, and it's something the mainstream press often misses as it focuses almost exclusively on the edgiest fare at the festival (of which there was no shortage this year).

I also left with renewed hope that today's young Christian artists might impact the moviemaking world of tomorrow. These hungry young film enthusiasts I shared so much time with expressed a passion for the truth that should serve them well as they begin to craft their own cinematic works—and show them at future Sundances.