Should you find yourself at some point driving through Utah, the heart of the Mormon church, you’d likely see billboards advertising motion pictures rarely available outside of the area. And if you end up in a Salt Lake City multiplex watching a mainstream blockbuster, you’ll quite possibly discover that the same movie you saw advertised on that billboard is showing in a packed theater just down the hall.
Mormons Make Movies examines the Mormon film industry and its origins within the Brigham Young University Motion Pictures Studio of the 1960s. Xan Aranda, the film’s director and a former fifth-generation Mormon, revisits her ancestral religion to explore creativity, craft, and social identity within its controversially clean-cut culture.
Inspired by dramatic religious educational films her mother starred in while a student at Brigham Young University, Xan interacts with acclaimed filmmakers who have made the rare crossover into the Hollywood mainstream and explores difficulties the devout face when participating in popular culture.
She probes her former religion to ask: How do Mormons navigate the intersection between creative expression and their mandated lifestyle? Does Mormon cinema differ from other contemporary Christian cinema? And how have the “five waves of Mormon cinema” affected the lives of those within and outside the faith?
Mormons Make Movies illuminates arguments among the devout regarding artistic freedom and the differing appetites for light, inspirational fare versus more provocative or introspective works. The film also explores the belief spreading among this filmmaking community that Mormon cinema is dying after nearly a century of life.
Mormons Make Movies is in development with Kartemquin Films
