Hosting a film discussion (Part 2): Which film?

In Part 1, we considered what the aims of hosting a film discussion might be. In this post, we’ll think about which are the best films to use.

Film-makers are essentially story tellers. Like all humans, they are in Francis Schaeffer’s words ‘glorious ruins’ – people made in the image of God, yet fallen. Because they are made in the image of God, we can expect every film to have things that we really can celebrate and endorse as good. Yet every film will also have aspects that fall short of God’s glory.

There’s sometimes a temptation for Christians to just want to show nice films. Let’s be honest, though. The word is broken and cursed. It isn’t always nice. Horrible things happen. So don’t be frightened away from films that illustrate something of just how broken the world really is.

Equally, sometimes Christians feel as they have to go for a ‘Christian’ film. Actually these films aren’t often very Christian. Perhaps the worst film night I ever went to was a screening of Evan Almighty – whilst vaguely biblically themed, it is a stupid and poorly made film which actually endorses a kind of religious humanism (and which was looking to make a quick buck out of a franchise!). I’d much have preferred that the leaders went for a film which was actually worth discussing!

With this in mind, here are some guidelines for choosing films (some of these points come from Ted Turnau):

• As I have implied above, you should not always disqualify a movie if there’s sex, violence or bad language in it. But if there is very strong sexual or violent content, it can be a distraction and this doesn’t help discussion.
• Go for a high-quality film – that is, a film that you’d happily see twice or that you were gutted to have missed when it was out in the cinema. It’s much easier to discuss a film that has been well made.
• I’d avoid films that are longer than two hours. Normally, people are far too tired to discuss them afterwards. Unfortunately this counts out some really great films (for instance, Inception and The Dark Night) – but its better to go for films that folks will actually want to discuss.
• Generally, students are most keen to discuss recent films. If you can go for a film from the last couple of years, all the better.

With all this in mind, here are a few films currently worth considering:

• 127 Hours
• Black Swan
• Source Code
• Super 8
• The Social Network
• The King’s Speech
• Toy Story 3
• True Grit

More to follow.

Advertisement