documentaries.ca (https://documentaries.ca/category/entertainment/religion/)
Intent on shaking up the ultimate ‘sacred cow’ for Jews, Israeli director Yoav Shamir embarks on a provocative – and at times irreverent – quest to answer the question, “What is anti-Semitism today?” Read more at IMDB or support this site and the filmmaker by buying it at Amazon.
Bill Maher interviews some of religion’s oddest adherents. Muslims, Jews and Christians of many kinds pass before his jaundiced eye. Maher goes to a Creationist Museum in Kentucky, which shows that dinosaurs and people lived at the same time 5000 years ago. He talks to truckers at a Truckers’ Chapel. (Sign outside “Jesus love you.”) He goes to a theme park called Holy Land in Florida.
We meet five Christian families, each with a gay or lesbian child. Parents talk about their marriages and church-going, their children’s childhood and coming out, their reactions, and changes over time. The stories told by these nine parents and four adult children alternate with talking heads – Protestant and Jewish theologians – and with film clips of fundamentalist preachers and pundits and news clips of people in the street. They discuss scripture and biblical scholarship. A thesis of the film is that much of Christianity’s homophobia represents a misreading of scripture, a denial of science, and an embrace of quack psychology.
Moving from one parish to another in Northern California during the 1970s, Father Oliver O’Grady quickly won each congregation’s trust and respect. Unbeknownst to them, O’Grady was a dangerously active pedophile that Church hierarchy, aware of his predilection, had harbored for over 30 years, allowing him to abuse countless children. Juxtaposing an extended, deeply unsettling interview with O’Grady himself with the tragic stories of his victims, filmmaker Amy Berg bravely exposes the deep corruption of the Catholic Church and the troubled mind of the man they sheltered. Read more at IMDB or support this site by buying it at Amazon.
Featuring never-before-seen footage, this documentary delivers a startling new look at the Peoples Temple, headed by preacher Jim Jones who, in 1978, led more than 900 members to Guyana, where he orchestrated a mass suicide via tainted punch. Read more at IMDB or support this site by buying it at Amazon.
Jesus Camp follows several young children as they prepare to attend a summer camp where the kids will get their daily dose of evangelical Christianity. Becky Fischer works at the camp, which is named Kids on Fire. Through interviews with Fischer, the children, and others, Jesus Camp illustrates the unswerving belief of the faithful. A housewife and homeschooling mother tells her son that creationism has all the answers. Footage from inside the camp shows young children weeping and wailing as they promise to stop their sinning.
Documentary filmmaker Brian Flemming examines the Bible and discusses the history of early Christianity, raising doubts as to whether the New Testament personage Jesus ever really existed. Flemming examines the similarity of the Jesus story to other savior myths of the time and points to inexplicable gaps in early Christian history that combine to shed doubt on the Bible’s Jesus story. Read more at IMDB or support this site by buying it at Amazon.
A man confronts the trauma of past sexual abuse as a boy by a Catholic priest only to find his decision shatters his relationships with his family, community and faith. Read more at IMDB or support this site by buying it at Amazon.
Town Hall, New York City, 26 June 2000. An evening with Eddie Izzard in which he moves back and forth in time, with religion as the loose but constant theme. He begins with Pope John Paul II, and then criss-crosses to Pius XII, the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades and Jerusalem, the world’s five major religions, the Dark Ages, Jesus, and the future. Along the way, Izzard makes observations about guns and monkeys, the World Series, the NRA and the IRA, mad cows, Socrates, the Stoned Olympics, the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, and the Mona Lisa. Izzard wears black nylons, black leather pants, a black jacket and a diamond necklace.
Amish teenagers experience and embrace the modern world as a rite-of-passage before deciding which life they will choose. Read more at IMDB or support this site by buying it at Amazon.
A documentary look, mostly through the eyes of Tammy Faye Bakker Messner, at her rise and fall as a popular televangelist with husband Jim Bakker. Traces their rise: her teen marriage to Jim; their children’s TV show (she was a puppeteer and singer), success founding the 700 Club, co-founding the Trinity Broadcast Network, and starting PTL Network; her nondenominational version of Christianity reaching out to all; and, their building of Heritage USA, a theme park. Things fall apart as money woes mount for Heritage and for Jim, as Tammy takes pills, and as Jerry Falwell takes PTL. Jim goes to prison; she remarries, finds herself alone again, yet remains unsinkable. Read more at IMDB or support this site by buying it at Amazon.
This controversial documentary about the stand-off between an unorthodox Christian group – the Branch Davidians, under the leadership of the young, charismatic David Koresh – and the FBI and ATF in Waco, Texas, from February to April 1993 presents a diffe
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Part documentary, part expose, this film follows one-time child evangelist Marjoe Gortner on the “church tent” Revivalist circuit, commenting on the showmanship of Evangelism and “the religion business”, prior to the start of “televangelism”
Read more at IMDB or support this site by buying it at Amazon.
