Three Change-Your-Life, True-Story Flicks
Today was my day to post over on the Tapestry blog. Here's what I wrote:
Recently in a class I teach we focused on women in church history. In addition to reading accounts of women martyrs, students watched the film “Iron Jawed Angels.” Most people don’t realize that Alice Paul, a key leader in the fight for suffrage in the USA, was a Quaker.
Driven by her conviction that God made man and woman equal, Alice Paul worked tirelessly for a constitutional amendment giving women the vote. While the film does not emphasize her faith, it does mention it.
Afterward I received this message from one of my students: “All was well until completing the reading for class today and seeing ‘Iron Jawed Angels’… The movie had an enormous impact on me. I've realized that all throughout the last few months the word that keeps coming up both within and outside of me is ‘courage.’” She went on to say that she had always thought of courage as a male quality rather than a human quality. But as a result of her Spirit-led, film-inspired clarity, her plans have shifted from spending a summer in comfort to pursuing a ministry opportunity in Ethiopia.
Fear not! How many times do we read that in Scripture? Yet sometimes in facing down our fears it helps to hear or see how others in the "cloud of witnesses" have refused to cower. And in addition to Iron Jawed Angels, two fairly recent additional films--these overtly Christian--come to mind.
The first is “Pray the Devil Back to Hell.” Imagine that all you want to do is live in peace, but soldiers—many of them children—terrorize your town. You endure hunger, thirst, homelessness, violence, and trauma like seeing your spouse knifed to death and your daughter raped.
Such was the plight of women all across Liberia in 2003. That is, until Christian and Muslim women united in non-violent protest and prayer, and in doing so changed the course of Liberia’s history.
Their remarkable story is told in the 2008 documentary, “Pray the Devil Back to Hell.” When peace talks stalled, these women donned white T-shirts, barricaded the doors, and made the negotiators inside go hungry and thirsty (like the rest of Liberia’s citizens) until they came to an agreement.
The surprising result was not only peace, but ultimately honor, as the women’s actions led to the election of Africa’s first female head of state. Wow.
The other film is “Malatya.” Remember the 2007 martyrs--three employees of a Turkish Christian publishing house who died for their faith? The victims, a German and two Turkish citizens, had their limbs bound and their throats slit. And this documentary tells their story.
“Malatya” is the name of the town in eastern Turkey where the events happened. And in this film viewers see news footage and hear from the martyrs’ wives, friends, and ministry partners about the tragedy and its aftermath.
The flick challenges comfortable disciples to get uncomfortable and live fearlessly, forgiving their enemies and showing love in the face of despicable injustice. I highly recommend it for personal reflection as well as group discussion. It comes with some extras including a visual prayer guide and extended scenes worth watching.
The first two movies are available by mail order at sites such as Netflix; the latter is available only for purchase. You can find it at malatyafilm dot com, where you can view a trailer.
Why not hold a movie weekend, bringing people together in your living room to watch and discuss such life-changing films? Or at your next women's retreat, set up a movie viewing room. You might just hear, “All was well until…”