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In his 1996 novel In the Beauty of the Lilies, John Updike depicts several characters who struggle with the tension between religious faith and a love for movies. American culture, Updike suggests, now seeks from film the things it used to find in religion: transcendence, moral instruction, comfort and a sense of order—not to mention the simple act of coming together in a large room to witness a light shining in the darkness.

If he's even partially right about that, then Christians who want to engage culture can scarcely afford to ignore the movies. Indeed, during the decade since Updike's book was published, the number of voices offering a "Christian perspective on film" has grown dramatically.

But culture extends beyond popular culture, and the world of movies extends beyond the multiplex. The frontiers of a Christian response to the movies can be found in places like Seattle, where an unusual documentary-film festival seeks to focus viewers' attention on human rights and social-justice issues while addressing those issues with a Christian voice.

Founded in 2006, the Film, Faith, and Justice festival recently concluded its second annual event. Last year's screenings took place in a somewhat cramped space above the cafeteria at Seattle Pacific University, a liberal-arts school associated with the Free Methodist denomination. At this year's venue—a spacious, theatre-style lecture hall at the University of Washington—FF&J nearly doubled its attendance. Students and professors rubbed shoulders with pastors, professionals, activists, cinephiles and international aid workers—and gave their attention in equal measure to films, lectures and panel presentations.

And there wasn't even a whiff of popcorn.

Film festivals are everywhere these days, but most of them don't intersperse the films with talks by a theologian pondering the possible connections between religion and violence, or by a circus performer exploring the notion of radical Christian community. Likewise, academic conferences on human rights issues are a dime a dozen, but few of them also feature a full slate of films that bring those issues to life simply by pointing a camera at them—sometimes without even a word of lecturing or polemicizing.

Film, Faith, and Justice brings together these two very different types of events. Thanks to the hybridization, lecture topics can move between academic abstraction and vivid cinematic description, and themes in a film can provide topics for a lively panel discussion, to help viewers process what they've just seen.

A scene from 'Iraq in Fragments'

"As we dialogue for a night, we're pointing at something that goes a lot deeper than just getting up and leaving after the end credits," says festival director Chris Keller. "I think we've stumbled on a pretty important way of engaging these issues."

Keller, 30, is a psychotherapist and editor in chief of The Other Journal, an online theological quarterly. Most of the films he screens are culled from a larger group selected by the organization Human Rights Watch for itsannual festival. When the opportunity arose to acquire screening rights for the Human Rights Watch films in Seattle, Keller and his colleagues seized it. "We start with the films we like," says Keller, "and then consider how they fit together thematically."

But by themselves, Keller notes, most of the films lack an explicit faith-based perspective—so he invites Christian academics and speakers to provide one. "Christian faith has a lot to offer on these issues," says Keller. "The Judeo-Christian heritage came up with the whole idea of human rights."

Documentaries aren't entirely foreign to the average moviegoer. A small but growing number find their way into mainstream cinemas each year. Stylistically, such films seem to fall into two categories: quiet, narrative fare about kids and animals (Born into Brothels, March of the Penguins, The Story of the Weeping Camel), and brash, assertive political and social works like Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11, Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me and Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth—each a heady mix of data, opinion and footage, presented by a narrator who more or less tells the audience what to think.

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