Vuissa: LDS Film Festival founder Christian Vuissa is featured in the Summer 2010 issue of Marriott Alumni Magazine (HT ldsfilm.com).

Sweater Friends: Mormon singer-songwriter duo The Sweater Friends have been blogging about their new album-in-the-making The Ghost and The Guest. They will be playing June 25 at the Utah Arts Festival.

Mormon Media Studies: Papers and panel proposals for BYU’s Mormon Media Studies Symposium are due June 30. The symposium will be held Nov. 11-12.

Amri’s Finds: So my cousin Amri Brown (who most of you may know as a BCC blogger) sent me a couple of Mormon-art-related links recently. Not that neither she nor I are necessarily endorsing these, but she (and now I) thought they might be of interest 1) Photographer Zachary Taylor’s portfolio of portraits of Mormon Ex-Convicts 2) The book trailer for Mike Wilson’s new novel Zombie (Amri says that Mike is an Argentine author who lives in Chile and that he was born and raised LDS).

Here are the headlines: Randy Astle has started a networking site for filmmakers; Christian Vuissa’s new film is coming out this fall; the indie film “White on Rice,” by Mormon David Boyle,  is gaining some buzz; and the Audience Alliance’s first film “Broken Hill” will test Kieth Merrill’s hope for a family-friendly alternative to Hollywood.

Full details after the jump.

Networking site for LDS filmmakers

LDS filmmaker and critic/historian Randy Astle has started up a network for LDS filmmakers called the LDS Filmmakers’ Network. According to Randy, the site is “open to all Latter-day Saints over 18 years of age regardless of professional experience, regardless of whether their films are gospel-themed or mainstream.” It’s uses the Ning social network platform, which is a pretty good idea, in my opinion.  Ning is pretty decent platform for this sort of thing, that is special interest but casts a wide enough net to generate enough network activity for it to be worth joining. For example, Ning has been a good platform for small private high schools, churches and hobby groups. It goes beyond just what you can do with Google or Yahoo! groups (which are basically listservs at heart) with features for member blogs, event management, photo and video uploading, bulletin board discussions, etc.

As Randy notes, “Members are asked to join one geographical group to let others know where they live. There are then 66 professional groups with categories like directors, producers, screenwriters, actors, and more technical positions like motion capture specialists, caterers, location managers, animal wranglers, accountants, musicians, choreographers, gaffers, and everything else both above and below the line.”

As with any social networking endeavor the trick will be to get enough people sign up that it reaches that critical mass where there are enough active users to generate a decent amount of activity. Considering the collaborative nature of filmmaking, it seems like the type of project that could have some success.

Christian Vuissa’s next film

LDS Film Festival creator Christian Vuissa’s seventh film “One Good Man: Life as a Latter-Day Dad” (formerly titled “Father in Israel”) hits Utah theaters on Oct. 9. Here’s the thing: if it gets a strong opening, it will screen for longer in Utah. I mean, yes, you can always pick it up on DVD, but the communal nature of seeing a film like this is not to be underestimated. My favorite Mormon arts experience still has to be seeing New York Doll with a group of Mormons and punks in San Francisco.

The film had some good buzz around it when it debuted at the LDS Film Festival earlier this year. My sister Katherine reviewed it for Mormon Artist. It will be interesting to see how it does in the theaters. LDS Film.com, sadly, no longer updates box office data and Box Office Mojo appears not to collect data on films with such limited releases.

Mormon indie director’s “White on Rice”

Dave Boyle follows up his film debut “Big Dreams Little Tokyo” with “White on Rice.” Screenings are set so far for the LA area and Utah in September. The film features Hiroshi Watanabe as a goofy, freshly divorced guy living with his sister. That’s not the best way to describe the premise so check out the site and watch the trailer and read the reviews. Also: what we’re seeing with Boyle, imo, is a somewhat particularly Mormon phenomenon — that of the foreign RM who finds a way to make a career/art/continuing relationship with the country/region/language where he served. This type of quirk has served Jared and Jerusha Hess well so it’ll be interesting to see if Boyle can gain some traction. Sweet indie quirk seems like a natural fit for creative cosmopolitan Mormon types.

Audience Alliance’s first project debuts

Audience Alliance’s attempt at a family-friendly, audience-driven and supported model for filmmaking gets its first test with the release of “Broken Hill.” The film is billed as a inspiring musical drama that’s based on a true story and  features a sheepherder’s son from the Australian Outback who loves classical music and through a series of plot points that I won’t detail here culminates in a prison concert. And it that sounds like a Hallmark special, well, that’s sorta the point.  “Broken Hill” opens Sept. 11 in Salt Lake City, Fresno, Dallas and Greenville, SC. Check the film’s website for details.  Kieth Merrill is the main figure behind Audience Alliance so it will be interesting to see if the pro-family formula wins over an Evangelical audience.

Father in Israel screening March 25

An advance screening of Christian Vuissa’s film “Father in Israel” will take place at 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 25, at the Megaplex 8 at Thanksgiving Point. Click here for details. The film’s theatrical release is planned for this fall.

“Little Happy Secrets” March 19-23 in Provo

The New Play Projects production of Melissa Leilani Larson’s play “Little Happy Secrets” opens tonight. You can buy tickets here. Larson bills her play as being “about a young woman coming to terms with her homosexuality without compromising her LDS faith.”

Menachem Wecker on a staging of “My Name is Asher Lev”

Menachem Wecker, who blogs on art and religion at Iconia, wrote a review earlier this month for The Jewish Press of a staging of Chaim Potok’s novel “My Name is Asher Lev.” I thought that this would be of interest to AMV’s readers because of Potok’s popularity in the world of Mormon letters, but even more I’m linking to it because it’s an excellent piece of criticism.

Satisfactory poetry

Writing for The Chronicle Review, Jeffrey H. Grey dissects the Poet’s Puffery that exists in the modern American literary scene. He equates the tendency to praise most modern poets with grade inflation and writes: “over the past few years of editing a large reference work on American poetry, I’ve found an unexpected pleasure in the merely satisfactory.”

Orson Scott Card on Mobility 2088

So I’m mainly posting this because I was amused to be pitched by a Social Media Marketing Manager, but for fans of OSC who’d rather see him prognosticate about the future rather than pontificate about politcs, should check out Mobility in 2088 (link is to YouTube), a Honda-funded documentary.

Synopsis
A wide-eyed sister missionary from Boise arrives in Austria to begin her 18-month-long mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Despite having to make a few cultural adjustments, Sister Taylor meets every challenge with optimism. Her enthusiasm to share the Gospel makes her indomitable, until she finds herself with an abrasive companion whom she doesn’t understand and doesn’t particularly like. This challenge, along with the ordinary vicissitudes of missionary life begin to wear on her, and thus in the process of sharing the Gospel, Sister Taylor finds herself gaining a better understanding of its key precepts: faith, repentance, forgiveness, and charity.

Analysis
The missionary film is a well-known sub-genre of Mormon film. In fact, some of the most notable and successful films, such as God’s Army, The Best Two Years, and The Other Side of Heaven have fallen within this genre. Even in Mormon films that haven’t been explicitly about missionary work, the missionary element usually makes an appearance.

If the missionary story has been told, why make another missionary movie? In the Q&A following the 5:00 showing of The Errand of Angels Friday night, the director/writer, Christian Vuissa, said that while many films have been made about missionaries, none has told the sister missionary story. The source of Vuissa’s material came originally from a woman named Heidi Johnson who simply wanted to tell the story of her mission. Having no previous experience in script-writing, she decided to make a go at it anyway. The film in its present form is the result of much re-writing by Vuissa, but still retains many of the elements of Johnson’s story.

With that in mind, I’m not entirely certain what makes this film more of a sister missionary film than other missionary films–other than that the protagonist is female and there are more scenes of hugging, crying, giggling, and at least one cat fight. The story has a lot of the predictable missionary moments that seem to be popular in this genre. The scene where Sister Taylor forces herself to eat a dubious-looking meat dish , as well as the scene where she tries to speak with a man on the bus and ends up saying something about a beech tree–these felt like they’d been lifted right out of The Other Side of Heaven.

One of the ways it seems that the director tried to make this a sister missionary film was to eliminate any possible male characters. There are almost no males in the film. We never see the mission president, we only see elders at the very end during the baptism scene, and the one investigator who is male almost always appear with his girlfriend. One of the most interesting aspects of sister missionary life–to me at least–is how sisters negotiate the male-dominated world of missionary work. There are a lot of sister missionary stereotypes that pervade Mormon culture. How do they confront those? These are themes that I would love to see addressed in a Mormon film some time. Perhaps if The Errand of Angels proves successful, we’ll see more sister missionary films in the future?

Another thing that could have improved The Errand of Angels was a little more character development. I was perplexed as to why the passage of time in the film had felt so short–a matter of weeks rather than months. In discussing this with a friend of mine, he made the point that Sister Taylor’s character doesn’t really change much. In pretty much every single scene of the film, she’s just as bubbling with idealism and untempered enthusiasm for missionary work, except for the few moments where she’s fighting with her companion. Sister Taylor experiences vicissitudes–even a difficult challenge–but nothing that fundamentally challenges her faith. There’s no real change.

Along with that criticism, however, I’m going to say “so what?” So, the film isn’t life-changing. So its lack of epic material sadly prevents me from declaring it “the Mormon Inn of the Sixth Happiness.” It is, however, thoroughly engaging. The characters are interesting, the setting is beautiful (I don’t think it’s possible to get a bad shot of Austria), the acting is decent, and the plot holds together well. Additionally, the pleasant soundtrack fits the lilting, genial, and softly contemplative tone of the film. Considering these things, and considering that the film was shot in 15 days with a crew of 10 people on a shoe-string budget, I would say this is a remarkable feat.

Finally, when evaluating a film’s success, I think it’s important to take into account its intended audience. I’m going to have to agree with Gideon Burton that this film will likely be very successful with Mormon audiences. About 1/3 of the sisters in my Relief Society right now are returned sister missionaries, and I’m nearly certain they would receive The Errand of Angels with enthusiasm. Also, I can see this film finding a niche in the Young Women program. When I was in Young Women, it seemed that my leaders often struggled to find engaging representations of female Mormon role models, especially any that were between that notorious teenager-married woman gap. The young men had their missions to focus on, and the young women had a…gap, that would hopefully eventually end in marriage. Perhaps Young Women leaders will see The Errand of Angels as something that will help the young women visualize their lives after high school as something more than a gap. I think that could be a positive thing.