Dispatch 03
Dear Friends,
Welcome to The Strata, a bi-weekly newsletter that tells a serialized story about my filmmaking process and updates you on the Impact Campaign for my first feature film.
The following is a continuation of Dispatch 02, which ended with:
I’m talking to my dad again after a years-long stretch of no contact. Evolution v. creationism has emerged as a topic that can keep us on the phone for hours. But we’re both starting to double down on our own, opposite beliefs. I need a new tactic.
Dispatch 03: Belly of the Ark
Remember Jonah and the Whale? If you’re like me, you remember the basics — man gets swallowed by fish, lives to tell tale — but you forget the details.
Let me refresh your memory. Jonah gets eaten after he falls overboard from an escape boat. He’s trying to get away from God, who’s commanded him to tell the wicked people of Nineveh to stop being bad. “Go forth and annoy a whole town! Tell them to change!”
Jonah, reasonably, flees – until a fish swallows him and barfs him back up on the shore of the town God told him to admonish in the first place. At this point, Jonah is so rattled that he gives in and warns folks, and it works. The Ninevites repent, and in a rare show of mercy, God doesn’t smite them, since he got his fill terrorizing Jonah. The lesson is something about forgiveness.
All the old Bible stories are coming back to me, now that Dad and I are talking again. I find them bizarre, brutal, and delightfully human — classic myths. But this nettles my dad because he believes the Bible Days were real, and my bemusement underscores the fact that I don’t anymore.
I want to keep talking, but I’m struggling. How do I show up as my full, honest self and simultaneously show respect for my father’s evangelicalism? What on earth are we supposed to talk about?
I go to Kentucky to look for some answers.
It’s Opening Day at Ark Encounter, a wooden structure whose footprint is the size of a football field and whose dimensions, measured in cubits, match those that God dictated to Noah in Genesis 6:15. The park’s parent, Answers in Genesis, may be the world’s largest employer of creationist PhDs. My dad is a long-term subscriber to many of their books and theories.
But I’m not here to talk to PhDs. I’m here to talk to visiting dads. I have questions, foremost:
How do they talk to their grown kids who are no longer believers?
Do they still talk?
Mike is definitely my guy. I spot him from a mile away, grinning and chatting people up in his yellow volunteer shirt. He droops when I tell him I’m no longer Christian, but he shares his testimony with me anyway: he was raised Catholic, then converted to evangelical Christianity as a young man. In his glory days, he pastored a Baptist church, but now he works in trucking. “I’ve got a son like you,” he says.
“What do you talk about? You and your son?” I ask.
“Well — he lives with me.”
I am genuinely surprised, but Mike tells me he gets along fine with his atheist son; it’s his Christian son he has the tension with. I ask him for advice on how to connect to my dad.
“There’s a prayer that you can pray.”
“I don’t pray anymore.”
“Well, it’s a short prayer.”
I laugh — I like this guy. “If you and your son are roommates, you gotta talk about something.”
He looks at me as if I might be daft. “Just…family stuff! ‘What are you gonna do today?’ ‘I’m gonna go mow the grass today, what are you gonna do?’ You don’t analyze it.”
I don’t understand what he means by this. I have so many more questions.
Mike is the first of many dads I speak to at the Ark. The place is crawling with them, and each one is having a tough time talking to at least one of his grown kids.
To be continued in the next dispatch.
Impact Campaign
Our Impact Campaign is planning screenings, workshops, and events to help and hold space for those affected by persistent divisions in their lives.
We are inspired as we connect with orgs that are working in the following areas:
Family estrangement
Religious divides, including faith-based v. scientific worldviews
The Bridging Community, which targets political polarization, and aims to strengthen civic life, such as the National Week of Conversation April 6-12.
If you or someone you know is connected to communities working in these areas, please reach out here.
SAVE THE DATE — Flood Premieres Theatrically in NYC This June!
DCTV - NYC theatrical premiere - June 19-25, including Father’s Day Weekend
Jacob Burns Film Center - June 23 with Eric Hynes!
Independent Lens - July 13 - Nationwide on PBS! Access on YouTube + your TV set
PBS Launched a YouTube Channel
You can watch brilliant Independent Lens films — don’t miss Julie Wyman’s The Tallest Dwarf, which premiered Monday, April 6 — for free, now, everywhere in the US. Flood will be comin round the bend in July.
Emmy Nom Shout-Outs
As a Television Academy and NATAS member, I help vote for Emmy noms. The prac-tice always shows me great films I missed in the fray. This year, my partner and I laughed and cried at Cristina Costantini’s Sally, a lesbian love story set in Texas and Outer Space. One interview subject makes a t*ts joke that we still repeat daily.
Two films that changed me forever are Reid Davenport’s Life After and The Ride Ahead. Both are made by and about people with disabilities. You have to see them to appreciate their depth of directing and producing badassery.
A series I cannot stop thinking about is Katrina: Come Hell and High Water by Geeta Gandbhir, Samantha Knowles, and Spike Lee. I started film school the summer HBO released Spike Lee’s When the Levies Broke, and it blew my mind. 20 years on, this explosive elegy does it all over again.