Have you ever seen a guitar player use an EBow? If you pick a guitar string, the sound fades out, but an EBow will make the string vibrate forever. You don’t even touch the string. You just hold up the EBow, and the magnet inside it causes resonance.
That’s a pretty good metaphor, I think, for how movies work. Our heartstrings respond naturally to good stories the way guitar strings vibrate to an EBow. There’s music there.
But a good EBow, like a great movie, needs juice. Where an EBow gets energy from a battery, a movie needs truth. This is something I teach my creative writing students all the time: If you want your story to resonate, the secret sauce is truth.
The way people resonate with truth is one element of the “power of stories”–a phrase I heard quite a bit when I went to the Sundance Film Festival with Young Life this January. A film festival might not seem like the most natural fit for Young Life staffers, until you realize that the natural thread that runs through movie directors and career evangelists is that they’re professional storytellers.
Windrider Institute
You might know that Sundance is the biggest, most prestigious indie film fest in the world. What you might not know is that the biggest bulk ticket-buyer of the festival is a Christian organization called Windrider Institute. Windrider was first formed by professors at Christian universities as a way to inspire students, artists, and academics to “create, view, and discuss visual media that address life’s ultimate questions.” After two decades, they’ve gotten pretty good at it.
The Windrider sessions my Young Life friends and I attended featured short films and interviews with filmmakers. Some of these shorts premiered at Sundance this year. Others were previously available.
One highpoint was a documentary called The Turnaround, available right now on Netflix. Let me tell you that its 25-minute length is worth every second of your time. The Turnaround tells the story of Trea Turner’s up-and-down 2023 season with the Philadelphia Phillies. The twist is that the doc is told from the angle of the hilarious Jon “Captain Philly” McCann who is having a year even more turbulent than Turner’s. His mouth alone earns the piece its R rating.
While Turner’s stealing bases, McCann steals the show as the story cuts between Turner’s on-field performance (or lack thereof) and McCann’s growing sense of anger, isolation, and despair. But after taking a tip from his therapist, McCann decides not to vent his frustration at the highly paid, underperforming Turner, but to orchestrate a city-wide show of grace in the form of a standing ovation for a $300 million player who had been putting up no results.
“Turner needs some love,” McCann tells the camera. “Not tough love. Love love.” This is the stuff male tears are made of.
What makes the Windrider Summit so neat is that after watching this roller coaster ride of a documentary, we in the audience, got to hear from the cinematographer who worked on The Turnaround. Turns out, there’s a lot that goes on behind the camera beyond just pointing and shooting.
So what does filmmaking have to do with sharing the gospel with teenagers? Everything, everything. Like this cinematographer, everyone I know in Young Life is preoccupied with telling a story–the gospel story–as skillfully and accurately as possible. That might mean going over and over and over a club talk, or it might mean cleaning a camp toilet so pristinely you could use it as a cereal bowl. Yes, the order and cleanliness of a property bathroom speaks to campers. And what it speaks of is no less than the holiness of God. I believe it.
Another takeaway from my time at Sundance: The brilliant people talented enough to get their films into the festival don’t have some second set of concerns that the Bible never gets to. Their films ask the same questions the rest of us do. Who am I, actually? How can I find my place in the world? Where’s the hope?
We had the chance to listen to artists from America, of course, but also England, Lebanon, Ukraine, Israel, Japan, and Iran. What we saw were wildly different films from world-ranging locations that all came back to the same core questions of identity, relationship, and meaning.
I was reminded of Harper Lee’s famous line: “There’s just one kind of folks.” That’s right. There’s only one kind of person, and there is just one name given to us whereby we might be saved (Acts 4:12), one mediator between God and us (1 Timothy 2:5), one shepherd (John 10:16).
For all the great questions I heard the films asking over the course of the week, I heard a lot of wrong answers, too. Or maybe “incomplete” would be a better word. Many movies found hope in good things like mended relationships, acceptance in the face of suffering, or the virtue of humility. Other movies were pretty dark. They weren’t necessarily inaccurate to human experience; a lot of the darkest movies I’ve seen have been the most honest. But if you’re looking for the light at the end of the tunnel, you better keep looking. It can be painful to bear witness to such aching, unanswered need, especially when, in Christ, you recognize the desperation you were called out of.
And of course that’s where Young Life comes in: we who were called out to call out. Though my volunteer leader days are behind me (or perhaps ahead?) I hope to be counted in the final reckoning alongside the called callers. Where the best and brightest have questions, we who are maybe not so bright have answers. Where the world gropes about in darkness, we have been mercifully brought into light. We know that our story has an ending, and that’s where eternity begins.
So let’s keep screening the story of Christ, reflecting the light of his grand narrative in the 90 minutes we’re given in this dark theater.
Written by: Trevor Babcock