Jesus Camp (Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady, 2006)

Fittingly enough, I watched Jesus Camp, a documentary on middle/southern American children who go to an Evangelical summer boot camp, only days before Mike Huckabee took America by surprise and won the Iowa Republican Caucus. But after watching Ewing and Grady's movie, I wasn't really that surprised at all; Huckabee's smiling face of evangelism is growing more and more powerful in this country, but after all, he is really more similar to the fanatics in this film than he would have us believe. As in their previous film, Boys of Baraka, which I truly loved, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady present a cultural phenomenon dealing with children, one that is overlooked in popular culture. Youth pastor Becky Fischer holds the summer camp for youths of evangelical (born again) Christians, most of whom seem to be home-schooled (no suprise). This is a sort of training camp for "the army of the Lord," a disturbing phrase that is used more than once. Fischer is quite a character; one moment, she is condemning Muslim countries for making their children into suicide bombers and radicals for Allah, but the next, she says that Christians in American need to be more like them in order to flourish. In this way, she and others teach the kids at the camp how to be a solider for Jesus, which includes praying for "righteous judges," praying to end abortion, praying to never be hypocritical in their faith, and pretty much praying and crying about everything. If you've read this blog before, you can probably tell I'm a hardcore feminist, so the section where the pastors were blatantly lying to children about abortion really got under my skin. News flash: a fetus isn't a tiny, perfectly formed baby like they told the campers. The amounts of misinformation and propaganda thrust at these children before they're even old enough to understand the nature of religion, or any complex political issue, is astounding. This might as well have been a reeducation camp. Fischer calls in to liberal Christian Air America host Mike Papantonio (who provides liberal balance to the evangelicals, in the absence of any narration) and tells him that she isn't aware of any political bias to her camp at all. Apparently, we didn't see the camp the way she did. And maybe that's at the heart of the matter; evangelicals could look at this film and be proud, while liberals like myself could be totally horrified. True, there is no narration, but you can pretty easily guess Ewing and Grady's slant through editing and music choice. And because I agree with them that this is a scary, underestimated force in American politics. I am glad to have seen this film as a wakeup call of sorts, and am more confused than ever as to the political future of this country 10-20 years down the road. 8/10

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Boys of Baraka (Heidi Ewing & Rachel Grady, 2005)

One last update before I head to Minnesota until Sunday - no updates until Monday at the earliest. But I did manage to catch Boys of Baraka, a movie I had been very excited to see, on PBS tonight. This is really a remarkable documetary, one that moves you into many different emotions and speaks to the power people have to help others. The Baraka school in Kenya takes 12 middle-school aged boys from Baltimore and enrolls them for two school years. They do both academic work and work that teaches them discipline, respect, and other qualities that these boys need to stay out of jail and have a successful life. The progress of these boys, four of which are profiled in-depth in the movie, is at first rocky at best. But through the progress of the film, these boys learn some important things about life and their places in it. The boys who are profiled in the movie are your stereotypical cires for help; none have fathers present, they get in trouble at school, and have trouble academically. My heart went out to Richard, who, as a 13 year-old boy, has a reading level of a second grader. No teacher has ever taken the time enough to even realize Richard's apparent learning disability, much less help him. Although I'm a stauch believer (and attender) of public schools, there's a difference between teachers who care, and those who don't. Without getting any further into urban politics, the school system, along with basically everyone in their lives, has failed these boys, and the Baraka School tries to repair some of that damage. Without giving away what happens to these students, the movie moves into both inspiration and devastation in its final minutes. This is what a documentary is supposed to me; moving and truthful, and reveals something about life. 9/10

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