A personal journey about why my father, a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn, ended up in the West African bush saving souls for Jesus, and why so many people are still doing it today.
There are over 400,000 Christian missionaries active in ther world today. In 1961 my father, a convert to Protestantism from Judaism, went to Ghana to be a missionary. A few months later my mother left the safety of American suburbia to join him. Armed with a bible and a few cans of disinfectant they spent the next nine years of their life in a small village in the bush converting Ghanaians to Christianity. I was born in 1963. My brother, born two years later, suffered a high fever shortly after birth, which left him permanently and severely brain damaged.
Soldiers of the Lord is a personal look at big issues. Structured as a road movie, rich with archive, I will explore the path my parents and many like them have taken. The film will be set in the US and Ghana, culminating in my father’s return to the village where I grew up, probably for the last time in his life.
With this film I hope to tell the unique story of a family shaped by a religious experience. At the same time I hope to provide some insight into colonial relationships which still exist and to the motivations of missionaries, aid workers and other do-gooders who continue to inhabit the developing world. For better or for worse.
I’m also opening up a potentially dangerous can of worms between me and my parents; will this journey bring us closer together or drive us further apart?
Wants
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