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From the
Oklahoma City bombing to the rash of schoolyard massacres, life's
seemingly random devastations are delivered to the doorstep with
each morning's headlines. And at home, what we hope will never happen to
those we love happens.
How can anyone believe
in God, any god, after experiencing life at its most devastating?
And what is it about human nature that leads one person to find religion
in the midst of such chaos and another to lose it?
In his new feature documentary film QUESTIONING FAITH, award-winning director Macky Alston turns
his camera on religion at the dawn of the new millennium.
Employing the emotionally evocative style of his acclaimed documentary
FAMILY NAME, Alston will pursue everyone from Buddhists to born-again
Christians, atheists to Orthodox Jews, to discover how people find
meaning in life when absolutely nothing seems to make sense.
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| HBO and
Cinemax Reel Life are committed to documentaries that capture the
daring, vivid moments of life and push the boundaries of our
expectations. With QUESTIONING
FAITH, Macky Alston is creating just such a film
– one that presents significant opportunities to break the mold of
where documentaries can go. It’s thrilling to witness the growth of a gifted voice such
as Macky’s and to help it reach audiences nationwide. “
Sheila Nevins,
Executive Vice-President of
Original Programming
HBO |
This is a journey film. Alston descends from
three generations of Presbyterian ministers and is himself a seminary
dropout. Upon the death of his former seminary classmate and close
friend Alan Smith, a young inner-city chaplain, Alston decides to return
to seminary - to try to find meaning in his demise, to wrestle with
his own faith, and to make this film.
In QUESTIONING FAITH, viewers accompany Alston
as he studies with some of the most cutting-edge theologians of our time, works
as a hospital chaplain, searches for people who are wrestling with similar
questions, and hunts down those who knew his friend Alan best, to see what they
think about God, in the wake of the loss of their loved one. Traveling
from Memphis to Maine, Alston together with viewers will explore deep into the
heart of faith struggle, and enter the lives of a diverse range of searchers,
including:
- A teenager who recently suffered the suicidal loss of her father and the
murder of her cousin (".he was like a brother to me"), only to
discover herself through Buddhism;
- A dentist's office receptionist in Washington whose favorite son died of
AIDS and whose Southern Baptist church and family don't want to hear about
it;
- A seminary doorman who "partly" lost his faith in Dachau along
with his Orthodox Rabbi father and the rest of his family;
- A Muslim woman sees angels, during brain surgery,
who tell her that she will
live and that her children will not be left alone;
- An African-American pastor, living 15 years with cancer, who believes that
each experience of suffering is another opportunity for her to connect with
her congregation, full of suffering people.
- A straight talking atheist woman who lived through the Russian Revolution
and believes that anyone who believes in a supreme being is not only on
opium for the masses, but delusional.
We invite you to take this journey with us, to meet a wide
range of people wrestling with faith in the face of tragedy or hardship.
Someone you meet in this film may remind you of someone you've known. At
least one story will awaken your own.
Our goal in making QUESTIONING FAITH is to create an engaging film that prepares people for crisis in their
lives; provides a tool for conversation around crisis and faith in a
non-partial, non-proselytizing forum; and inspires a sense of respect
for people with a range of religious views as they try to understand
their lives.
It is in telling our stories that we learn to grieve and
laugh and heal. It is in hearing the stories of others that we realize we
are not alone in our pain. And as we struggle individually and
collectively, it is in hearing the stories of life after death that we may
discover the hope we need to keep searching for meaning and joy in our lives.
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