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188 | 8 Global Film Evangelism While much of the Christian film industry settled into domestic production, several visionary producers looked across the seas. Realizing that a media-saturated market in the United States limited their appeal, they envisioned multiplying their investments and their effectiveness in communicating to the world. Grounded in the Great Commission—the call of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew to preach the Gospel throughout the world—these producers sought to adapt the medium to other cultures, with mixed results. As communicators, they were little concerned with cross-cultural communication problems; even when these filmmakers produced their films in foreign countries, their product was clearly a Western, Christian view of the world, with mostly Caucasian actors and Western music. Often unexpected events enlivened the filming process. Not many film companies can claim to have converted a bank robber while he was about to carry out a heist. During the course of filming The Caged (Holland, 1974) for International Films, the director Don Ross was shooting a scene where an evangelist is preaching in the street. Not knowing a movie was being filmed, a bank robber was on his way to rob a bank when he heard the message of the actor and he received the Lord. Later he turned himself in to the police.1 Films Afield As we have seen in earlier chapters, the Baptists, Methodists, Lutherans, and Presbyterians were able to chronicle documentary footage of their overseas missionary work from 1930 onward. Many of these were filmed by missionaries who were amateur camera operators, but these “home movies” found an audience among their denominational supporters. These films were not part of “global film evangelism”; rather, they were promotional films to encourage American Christians to give to denominational mission projects. One early pioneer of global film evangelism was Tom Hotchkiss, who incorporated his own company, Films Afield. Originally a radio announcer, Global Film Evangelism | 189 Hotchkiss had served as a deck officer in the Merchant Marine during World War II, crisscrossing the Pacific making the supply runs to the China-BurmaIndia theater. Against this setting he had the opportunity to see firsthand the Third World. After the war Hotchkiss began his own film company, noticing that many mission organizations were becoming interested in employing film as a new medium for evangelism and for raising support. In the early 1950s, he and his company produced their first documentary missions film, Light of the Sun (1957). Julius Bergstrom, a veteran China missionary reassigned to Japan after the communist takeover of China, shot the 16mm pictures for their first overseas production assignments for the Conservative Baptist Foreign Mission Society (CBFMS). Ten films were made in a fourmonth tour in 1957, and eventually that figure rose to thirty films for CBFMS. According to Hotchkiss, “A virtual flood of films followed as scores of foreign missions signed contracts and we became recognized as global film makers.”2 Hotchkiss and his wife, Carol, zealously produced dramatic evangelistic films overseas for distribution in those same countries. An early effort in the 1970s was Suzanne (1972), shot in the French-speaking Ivory Coast and featuring an all-African cast. A very explicit salvation message is intertwined with a tale of love, jealousy, and intrigue; eventually, more than two hundred 16mm prints of the film were used by various mission groups in Africa. Most Films Afield projects were thought provoking and serious in nature. For example, a popular urban ministry film, Pourquoi Moi? (Why Me?) (1974), dealt with the terminal illness of a young African photojournalist, who must accept the reality of his dying as he seeks guidance through his spiritual and mental confusion. The film Chidi (1985), set in the Nigeria-Biafra Civil War, told the story of African Christian heroes. One of the most widely exhibited films, It Happened to Shankar (1987), was shot in India with a cast of boys in their early teens. By the 1990s, the goal of the company was to produce two dramatic evangelistic films a year in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, respectively. A charge leveled at missions and mission films by their opponents is that they are financed by foreign interests, not by indigenous supporters. Mission films are almost always financed by donors from Western countries who are directly funding missionary activity inside the target country. Films Afield became a totally owned subsidiary of a “for profit” business called Tri Media Communications, and each missionary film was made as a limited partnership whose profits were applied...

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