DeliverUsFromEvil Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Can't get enough of great docs? You may have missed these during their fest runs, but you can still catch them on DVD. Here are seven documentaries from the last couple years that are well worth seeing, if you haven't caught them yet ...

1) Deliver Us From Evil -- Amy Berg's wrenchingly painful documentary about Oliver O'Grady (pictured, above), a pedophile priest who was moved around from parish to parish to prey on unsuspecting families by his boss, Cardinal Roger Mahony , now Archbishop of Los Angeles (who just a couple days ago, announced a $660 million pre-trial settlement of sexual abuse cases involving other priests), in spite of Mahony's knowledge of O'Grady's penchant for raping children, is a must see, and frankly, I'm shocked that more people haven't seen this Oscar-nommed film. It was by far the most powerful film I saw at last year's Toronto International Film Festival last year. If you haven't seen this film, get it in your DVD rental queue post haste.

2) Jesus Camp -- Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing have kind of take the documentary world by storm the past couple of years, with two back-to-back years of being on the feature-length documentary Oscar short list (hey, it's only a matter of time before they win, trust me). In 2005 they made the excellent Boys of Baraka (also worth catching on DVD if you want to have yourself a Rachel-and-Heidi weekend), and then they hit the ball out of the park again with Jesus Camp, about which our own James Rocchi said, "The best horror film I've seen all year is a documentary."

It should be a green-tie affair at the opening night gala of this year's Tribeca Film Festival. The event, happening April 25, will be hosted by Al Gore and is set to feature some entertainment that will focus on the global warming issue. This entertainment is part of a partnership with the SOS (Save Our Selves) Campaign, which raises climate crisis awareness and will include live performances from some of the artists participating in SOS' Live Earth concert series happening on July 7. The acts set for the gala weren't revealed, but some of those involved with the Live Earth shows include Red Hot Chili Peppers, John Mayer, John Legend, Black Eyed Peas, Korn and Melissa Etheridge, who recently won an Oscar for the song she wrote for the Gore-featured documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

Also, the night will include the premiere of seven short films, each of which deals with the problems and the solutions of the crisis and each of which is shorter than ten minutes. The directors and titles of these shorts were not yet revealed either, because the seven showcased films have not been chosen yet. They will be selected by the festival's planners from the 60 shorts that were commissioned by SOS. Some of the filmmakers who participated include Jonathan Glazer, Kevin Macdonald, Abel Ferrara, Amy Berg, Ari Sandel, the doc duo Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady and someone from Aardman Animation (Peter Lord? Nick Park?). It isn't completely made clear, but it seems that all 60 of the commissioned films will be shown during the Live Earth event. So, if you can't make it to New York City for the world premiere of the seven shorts, you can see at least those if not all of them at one of the concerts (so far the only locations announced are Shanghai, Sydney, London and Johannesburg, while the cities in the U.S., Brazil, Japan and Antarctica are TBA). I probably won't be able to attend the gala or one of the concerts, so hopefully there will be another place for me to see the films. After all, this is the best news for shorts fans since Cannes' announced its own opening night compilation.

As long as the Academy gives separate screenwriting Oscars for original screenplay and adapted screenplay, they should also consider honoring non-fiction screenplays. Not all documentaries have writers, but many do -- according to the Writers Guild of America the number of docs with writing credit has increased by 50% in recent years. That is why the WGA began awarding non-fiction screenwriters two years ago; Super-Size Me was the first to be honored.

I'm not sure why the WGA announced the doc noms separately from the rest, but in doing so the guild is allowing for the category to be given less attention. Of course, with the news that Borat is nominated for the adaptation prize, everything else about the WGA Awards is being overshadowed (I paid more notice to the Borat news, too). But I think it is important for documentary fans to know that the WGA does honor non-fiction writers. Maybe one day they'll even go and split up the category to distinguish between the original and adapted non-fiction scripts (there may not be enough of the latter, though).

The nominees for the 2007 Documentary Screenplay Award are: Deliver Us From Evil (written by Amy Berg); The Heart of the Game (written by Ward Serrill); Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos (story by John Dower and Mark Monroe; screenplay by Mark Monroe); Who Killed the Electric Car? (written by Chris Paine); Why We Fight (written by Eugene Jarecki).

I never understood why the Golden Globes are such prestigious awards. I mean, what really makes them any different from any other critics awards? How did the Hollywood Foreign Press Association become so popular that millions of viewers tune in every year to witness the group's choices for best this and best that? I mean, they shouldn't be any more important than the International Press Academy, right?

Who? The IPA, that group that hands out the Satellite Awards. Never heard of them? Well, they just celebrated their 11th annual event on Sunday, and they're about as useless as the HFPA, only more so because they don't even get a broadcast. The IPA has more to do with the HFPA, too. The group is actually a spin-off of the more familiar awards-givers, having separated in 1996 as a broader organization (HFPA is very exclusive, IPA claims to admit any interested journalists), which explains their spin-off-sounding award name.

Yesterday we told you about the big new out of Los Angeles: The Los Angeles Archdiocese announced the payout of $60 million in reparations to 45 victims of clergy sexual abuse. Cardinal Roger Mahony, who heads the Archdiocese, was prominently featured in the Oscar short-listed documentary Deliver Us from Evil, for his alleged role in moving pedophile priest Father Oliver O'Grady from parish to parish, where he preyed on hundreds of young victims.

The Los Angeles Archdiocese currently has over 500 pending cases from alleged victims of clergy abuse, many of them naming Mahony in his supervisory capacity. Cinematical managed to track down Deliver Us from Evil director Amy Berg, who very graciously agreed to share with our readers her thoughts on Mahony, the payout by the Archdiocese, and the role her film may have played in helping to bring about the settlement.

You know how I feel about the proliferation of film festivals all over the globe, but as this particular one happens to be in my own backyard, I guess I can make an exception ... this time. Which film festival gets this special treatment? Why, it's the Film Independent Los Angeles Film Festival of course.

According to Variety, the festival announced this week that on October 24 it will start accepting submissions for the 13th annual event, held June 21 - July 1 2007 in Los Angeles. The entry deadline for short films and music videos is Feb. 9, while the deadline for feature-length narrative and documentary films is March 1. And, if you act now (or at least before January 12) you can even get a discount on your entry fees. Not a bad thing considering the minuscule budgets of most of these films.

Some of last years fest winners include Steve Collins, writer/director of Gretchen, who won for best narrative feature and Amy Berg, writer/director of Deliver Us From Evil, (which our own Kim reviewed) who won for best documentary feature. Both winners received $50,000, money they will probably use to pay off all the credit cards they maxed out to finance their films. Oscar-winning actress and producer Charlize Theron, whose indie credits include Monster and the documentary East of Havana, was also awarded the Spirit of Independence Award for her commitment to artistic independence in film at the event.

Especially of note for aspiring filmmakers looking for exposure is that the Los Angeles Film Festival is a qualifying fest in all categories for not only the Independent Spirit Awards but for the Academy Awards' short film categories as well. So indie filmmakers, dust off those scripts hidden in your drawer, borrow your parents' video camera, gather your friends, find a barn and start shooting because the next Academy Award for short films might just go to you. (And if it does, Cinematical wants a spot in that acceptance speech.)

Note: This review originally ran during the Toronto International Film Festival. It is being rerun now in conjunction with the film's opening this weekend. - ed

A child being sexually molested by a trusted adult is bad enough; when the molester is the Catholic priest from the parish the child has grown up with, the horror is magnified that much more. Not only is there all the usual shattering of trust and innocence that is the inevitable fallout of a child victimized by a predator, but the child's spiritual faith is shattered as well. In her powerful documentary Deliver Us From Evil, Amy Berg delves headfirst into the murky waters of pedophilia in the Catholic priesthood and the Church's culpability in covering it up, as told through the stories of three of the hundreds of victims of Catholic priest Oliver O'Grady, known to the families who trusted him as "Father Ollie."

What makes Berg's film both amazing and incredibly wrenching is that she was able to interview Father O'Grady extensively for the film. Almost as if he's using the camera as his own private confessional booth, O'Grady talks candidly about his problem -- being sexually attracted to children -- and how he used the position of spiritual trust granted him by the Church's authority to molest and rape the children of his parishes. You can't help but be chilled watching O'Grady -- an innocuous-looking older man now, with white hair and twinkling eyes, smile as he talks about getting sexually aroused by young children in their underwear, and smirk as he discusses being forgiven his sins by confessing them to another priest, as if his victims were chalkboards he could scribble all over and then erase.

Deliver Us From Evil, director Amy Berg's scathing indictment of Father Oliver O'Grady, a pedophiliac priest who was transferred around northern California for over 20 years while he preyed on young children in his parishes, has created quite a furor in Los Angles and revived interest in the actions of Cardinal Roger Mahony, who directly supervised O'Grady for five of the years he was actively molesting young children. In the film, O'Grady, who now lives in Ireland after being deported from the United States upon completion of a prison sentence for the molestation of two young boys, says that he was able to abuse children for so long in part because of the actions of Cardinal Mahony, who now heads the Los Angeles Archdiocese -- the largest in the country.

William Hodgman, top deputy of the target crimes division in Los Angeles, said in the report in the New York Times that the doc "will fuel ongoing consideration as to whether Cardinal Mahony and others engaged in criminal activity." Michael Hennigan, an attorney for the archdiocese, fired back that "If Mr. Hodgman is suggesting in any way that the cardinal is the subject of a criminal investigation, he is being irresponsible and in our judgment is committing prosecutorial misconduct."

Browsing CNN at 5:00 am yesterday -- it was TV morning -- I saw the story that the MPAA has decided to 'red-band' the trailer for the upcoming doc Deliver Us From Evil. The trailer -- cut by Lionsgate from Amy Berg's excellent documentary -- has, essentially, been rated 'R,' and can't play anywhere except in front of an R or NC-17 movie. Of course, as the CNN story explains many theater chains won't play 'red-band' trailers at all, meaning that the most traditional mode of publicizing a movie -- in the Coming Attractions -- isn't available to Lionsgate or Deliver Us From Evil in many cases. This decision is prompting Lionsgate to release the film unrated -- again, affecting where the film can be shown and advertised. (I wish Kirby Dick's This Film Is Not Yet Rated had done a better job of explaining that, in fact -- the mall leases and newspaper policies that strangle unrated films in their crib with red tape.) I've seen Deliver Us From Evil, and while it's about rough stuff -- a serial child abuser who was essentially protected by the Catholic Church for 20 years -- it's real stuff; this all happened, and nothing in director Amy Berg's treatment of the story is salacious or sensational or cheap. But the MPAA (whose anonymous ratings board includes representatives of clergy) is choosing to significantly impact the marketing of Deliver Us From Evil with their decision. As has been asked before: Who are these people again? And what, exactly, are they protecting us from? (Addenda: For the trailer, click here.)

A child being sexually molested by a trusted adult is bad enough; when the molester is the Catholic priest from the parish the child has grown up with, the horror is magnified that much more. Not only is there all the usual shattering of trust and innocence that is the inevitable fallout of a child victimized by a predator, but the child's spiritual faith is shattered as well. In her powerful documentary Deliver Us From Evil, Amy Berg delves headfirst into the murky waters of pedophilia in the Catholic priesthood and the Church's culpability in covering it up, as told through the stories of three of the hundreds of victims of Catholic priest Oliver O'Grady, known to the families who trusted him as "Father Ollie."

What makes Berg's film both amazing and incredibly wrenching is that she was able to interview Father O'Grady extensively for the film. Almost as if he's using the camera as his own private confessional booth, O'Grady talks candidly about his problem -- being sexually attracted to children -- and how he used the position of spiritual trust granted him by the Church's authority to molest and rape the children of his parishes. You can't help but be chilled watching O'Grady -- an innocuous-looking older man now, with white hair and twinkling eyes, smile as he talks about getting sexually aroused by young children in their underwear, and smirk as he discusses being forgiven his sins by confessing them to another priest, as if his victims were chalkboards he could scribble all over and then erase.