From Fact To Friction

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Directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady weren't looking for controversy. They just wanted to make a documentary in which they "explored faith through the eyes of a child," as Grady puts it. But their search for that true-believing youngster took them to Becky Fischer ("her name kept coming up") and the summer camp she runs for evangelical children in North Dakota. What they found themselves recording for Jesus Camp were 8- to 10-year-old kids in the throes of religious ecstasy--including talking in tongues--and some unexpected connections between that primitive religiosity and hard-line conservative political beliefs. At camp, a cardboard cutout of George W. Bush is venerated as if it were the Shroud of Turin.

The inherent power of their film did not dawn on Ewing and Grady until they began working with their footage in the cutting room. In a sense, Jesus Camp is a record of a crime--the theft of childhood by possibly well-intended but narrowly ideological adults. Its subjects, of course, don't see it that way. Fischer has said it's great publicity for her endeavors. And Ewing sees her point. "It's hard not to respect people who have deep passions," she says. Neither she nor Grady can entirely fathom why the Evangelicals feel so profoundly threatened in a largely tolerant U.S. They speculate that casual, unthinking secularism, represented by everything from the TV schedule to Wal-Mart's groaning shelves, makes these Evangelicals feel encircled and unheeded despite their relative prosperity. The directors also wonder, as Grady puts it, "if these parents can hold back the tide of natural rebellion and cultural engulfment" that will threaten their kids in adolescence. Who knows? But in the meantime we have this coolly objective and well-made film to contemplate. And reckon with. --R.S.

IN PURSUIT OF MADNESS

Dreams and Demons

Werner Herzog's passions are the stuff of moviemaker legend: the time he walked 400 miles, from Munich to Paris, to help a sick friend live longer; or when, having told budding director Errol Morris that if the young man ever completed a film Herzog would eat his shoe, and Morris did, Herzog ate the damn shoe.

A charismatic dreamer with inexhaustible curiosity and a mile-wide stubborn streak, Herzog, 64, might be a character from one of his own classic movies--Fitzcarraldo, or Aguirre, the Wrath of God--in which a man is seized by some outsize ambition and just about kills himself trying to realize it. But those were fiction films, which constitute less than half of Herzog's output. In his documentaries he is just as driven to make film heroes out of real men with their own crazy dreams.

Often, the dream is to fly: on skis (The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner) or in an airship (The White Diamond) or in a U.S. Navy plane (Little Dieter Needs to Fly). That last film--about a German boy who arrived in America with the dream of flying, flew missions over Vietnam, was captured and tortured, and escaped--had so much natural drama that Herzog turned it into a "real" movie, Rescue Dawn, with Christian Bale as Dieter.