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A brand new film festival this week in Miami includes many titles that would be at home at, say, the Creation Film Festival or the Heartland Film Festival. There's The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, a moral parable about the friendship of two boys on opposite sides of a Nazi camp fence. Bandslam, a Walden/Summit musical-comedy-romance. Bella, an award-winning tale about a crisis pregnancy produced by Catholics but popular with Christians of all stripes.

Founders Anrrich, Alvarado, and Brennan

But there's also The 13th Day, a stylish Catholic-produced British indie about the 1917 Marian apparitions and "miracle of the sun" at Fatima, Portugal. And Duska, a documentary about Wanda Poltawska, a survivor of the Nazi Ravensbrück camp and a lifelong confidante of Karol Wojtyla—later Pope John Paul II. Poltawska experienced a medically inexplicable recovery from cancer after then-Bishop Wojtyla wrote to ask the prayers of Padre Pio, a stigmatic priest (now a canonized Catholic saint) credited with a supernatural gift of healing.

The John Paul II International Film Festival, beginning Thursday and running through November 7, aspires to be a festival with a difference. Its organizers—social worker Rafael Anrrich, actress Laura Alvarado, and filmmaker Frank William Brennan—are committed Catholics, and quotations from Pope John Paul II's 1999 Letter to Artists pepper their website and their conversation. But they point to the late pope's ecumenical appeal to Protestants—and his interreligious outreach to Jews and Muslims—as their inspiration for reaching out to filmmakers and audiences outside the Catholic fold.

Anrich, Alvarado and Brennan recently spoke to CT Movies about their fledgling fest. Their mood was buoyant and positive—though at the end of the interview, answering the last question, Alvarado became choked up and her voice shook as she discussed their struggles and the challenges of living by faith.

How's the festival shaping up?

Laura Alvarado: It's going very well. It's been a very fast process. Usually film festivals take one and a half to two years to put together that first year—what it's going to be about, getting sponsorships, getting the guests involved—and we've done it in nine months.

Frank Brennan: Our goal is to do not only the film festival—praise be to God if it goes through and if it's a success—but we want to use the idea of creating a new evangelization. To do the John Paul II Music Festival, the John Paul II Art Festival, Theatre Festival—all these different forms of art with the idea of the new evangelization which John Paul II stressed for the laity to be involved in.

On your website you issue an invitation to all faiths—Catholic, Protestant and even non-Christian—but your festival is named after a Catholic pontiff. What kind of response are you hoping for from non-Catholics and what are you getting so far?

Alvarado: We're getting a lot of positive feedback and a lot of energy from both the Protestant and the Jewish communities. Same thing from the Islamic community—they're thrilled. It's not so much that we're just some Catholic kids putting together a festival as it really goes back to the pope, to John Paul II. [His message was that] human dignity and respect and love and forgiveness were all things that were granted to all people.

People relate to that, people react to that. We're getting e-mails, letters, phone calls from all over the world. One of our sponsors is the Jewish community center in Miami, the Dave & Mary Alper JCC, who are actually sponsoring us by giving us their theater for free.

Rafael Annrich: A lot of Catholics, unfortunately, don't realize how much we share with our Protestant brothers and sisters. By really understanding the faith, we begin to realize that we all believe in Jesus, we all believe in God, and that's what unites us together. There are obviously some basic, fundamental differences, but at the same time there's so much more that we have in common—our love of the Bible, our love for Jesus.

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