Film is a powerfully evocative art.

Movies not only mirror our desires and dreams.
Film also shape our dreams and desires as we struggle to understand ourselves and our world.    

We know that the Bible itself is not only an account of God’s search for a home on earth with people, but also woven narrative telling the stories of people who search for meaning in their lives and seek to embody that meaning in the world. Film is a contemporary powerful way of storytelling that can address the faith and beliefs of people towards a transcendent. Perhaps, if Jesus were alive in this generation, he would probably have told his stories and parables by means of film!

Christians have enjoyed a rich heritage of making use of the arts in order to carry out the tasks of bearing witness to the Christian faith e.g. the cathedrals of the Middle Ages that attempted to express Christian truth through their stained glass, handsome murals, ornate ceilings and soaring arches. Architecture, acoustics, the careful use of lights and shadows, even the smell of incense – all these have served as media for the communication of the gospel.

The 21st century is a mediated world where we encounter the inevitable fact of modern and post-modern life: the mass media and its products. Many films offer a unique opportunity for theological reflection. It offers a creative language – an imaginative language of movement and sound that can bridge the gap between the rational and the aesthetic, the sacred and the secular, the church and the world, and thereby throw open fresh new windows on a very old gospel.

Communio et Progressio, the Pastoral Instruction for the application of the Means of Social Communications of the Second Vatican Council identifies the help film offers to Catholics. They help the Church reveal herself to the modern world. It fosters dialogue within the Church. Film helps identify contemporary opinions and attitudes. In turn, it is the role of the Church to give people the message of salvation in a language they can understand and to involve herself in the concerns of humanity.

The 21st Century is a mediated world where we encounter the inevitable fact of modern and post-modern life: the mass media and its products. As Japanese sociologist Hidetoshi Kato says,
Mass media can be seen as one of the most decisive factors shaping the populace of a society. The belief systems and behavior patterns of the younger generation in many societies today are strongly affected by the messages they prefer to receive (or are forced to receive) either directly or indirectly through mass media.

Cinema is considered as one of the youngest arts but at the same time, it is rapidly becoming one of the most pervasive and powerful arts, especially with the increasing ease of distribution and exhibit (satellite and cable transmission, distribution via video tape, video compact discs, digital video discs) that give film a truly global profile. Part of the proof of the popularity of film is its large and increasing share of the global leisure industry with more than a billion dollars turnover of capital every year. Often, cinema is accused of corrupting the young, debasing moral standards, being part of the fabric of social decline that promotes mindless entertainment but at the same time, in its brief century of existence, it has also produced sublime works of art which touch the human condition with compassion, grace and skill of masterworks as in other art forms.

A possible matrix for understanding film schema is the intersection of the vertical axis containing extreme points of realism and fantasy over the horizontal axis of the extremes of art and entertainment.  Cinema was born out of a desire to reproduce images which represent the world in which we live, to capture life and freeze it for posterity by allowing technology to work within the realms of imagination.

According to film critic Marsha Sinetar,
Movies are not only teachers but also a contemporary Church where people look for their spiritual uplift and where the ability for reel power may be possibly developed, as film viewers are able to dig out and use whatever is spiritually valuable in a movie.

Motion pictures may unwittingly be transformed as spiritual guides to life. If movies are watched discerningly – films may become the contemporary equivalent of cultural myths, fairy tales, fables and other important stories that teach and reinforce lasting spiritual truth and impart great, grand lessons of personhood. Movies are significant, contemporary spiritual resource – a vehicle for communicating about our shared experience of being human. back

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