A filmmaker’s inner focus

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How much do we value a free Internet?	How to use new media for building unity	Using the web to spread the good news	The other publishing revolution

I never imagined I’d be making films

Hidden in Time. This awardwinning short film was shown at film festivals, interfaith conferences, university courses and private screenings.

I grew up in the middle of hop-country in rural Washington State with snow-capped Mt. Rainier visible from my backyard. As a child I never imagined I’d be making films. I come from a big family with a long tradition in agriculture and deep French Canadian roots that go back to 1693. A big part of my family migrated to Washington State 100 years ago as farmers and merchants following new opportunities in the great Pacific Northwest.

I was born in 1964 and raised along with eight brothers and sisters by Catholic parents, near the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. I first became interested in film production during a high school media class in which I created an animated film as a class project. It was also during these years that I began to experience an inner desire to do something with my life that would make a difference in the world of the early 1980s, a time that appeared to me to be at the brink of nuclear war.

Following graduation, I entered the Air Force with a strong desire to become a pilot, more specifically a missionary pilot flying supplies to remote regions that needed assistance. The Air Force opened up a new world for me: I grew in recognition of my own convictions and values, but understood that I had much to learn about how to hold on to them and express them openly. Military life presented challenges that I had not encountered before. On the one hand I wanted to be part of the group, but certain lifestyle choices were contrary to the way I believed I should live. I was in turmoil. I didn’t have the courage to be different. I didn’t want to be left out.

One Sunday at Mass, I was given the grace to choose God and his ways. But I told God he’d have to help me find friends who shared the same values and convictions. And from that moment forward an adventure opened up before me that I would have never imagined — along with the friends I needed.

During these years, I made a few personal discoveries: I took pilot lessons while working as an Air Force jet mechanic, but soon discovered that I really didn’t enjoy flying enough to continue. What I did discover instead was a desire in my soul for unity among the various Christians that I encountered in the military. So often they were divided along lines that I thought were superficial. And when I found anti-Catholic literature being secretly spread, I was deeply saddened that those who called themselves Christian were working against each other. I decided to make friends with both Protestants and Catholics, hoping to build some bridges of understanding.

One day, I began reading the writings of the Second Vatican Council, particularly the documents on ecumenism. And while reading I stopped short on a sentence I’ve never forgotten. It read, “…be as holy as you can be.” Somehow those simple words resonated deep within me, and I prayed that if I could do anything with my life that somehow it would be in function of ecumenism.

My final two years of service brought me back to a base in New Mexico. It was in New Mexico that I had made my first choice of God. There I met a member of the Focolare Movement, who invited me to meet a group of friends who put the Gospel into practice in everyday life. I was impressed with their sincerity and genuine struggles to put the Gospel message of love into daily action. The Gospel “lived” challenged me in new ways, and I found myself becoming courageous in doing “acts of unconditional love” that I would have never done before. That same summer I attended my first Mariapolis [the Focolare summer gathering] and was further attracted by the conviction that the world is waiting to see love in action.

There would be much to share from that first encounter until today. Since leaving the Air Force in 1986, I immersed myself in the Focolare’s spirituality of unity and went to college to study filmmaking. Today I work full time in my own business of film and video production on everything from documentaries to commercials and corporate videos, all the while trying to love the people who are my colleagues or the subjects of the films.

Last year I wrote and produced my first short drama, which was a look into the common humanity shared by two men of completely different social, cultural and religious backgrounds. I wrote the film after reading an article in The New York Times about a Muslim man in Iraq who lost his wife and children to an errant U.S. missile that hit a residential building in Baghdad where they lived. It saddened me that his personal story of grief and loss is hidden in our times. The film is a journey through our stereotypes, a recognition of the great sacrifices we all make for those we love and the consequences that our choices can have on those to whom we are indifferent.

But most of all, what I have discovered is that my contribution to a better world is not so much through my films but through this embrace of a lifestyle of love. The stories I work on may or may not have an impact on the viewer, but the way I treat my neighbors each day with love and respect, sometimes even sacrificing my own opinions or creative impulses as a gift of love for them, is what makes a difference to them. And at times I can see how it filters into my work and somehow makes it more complete.

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