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But the works screened at Film, Faith, and Justice don't quite fit either category. Although they deal with hard-hitting social issues, most of these films maintain strong narratives, show stylistic restraint and keep the filmmakers behind the camera, leaving viewers to draw their own conclusions. "I think all documentaries have an angle," says Keller, "even if they're striving for neutrality. But there's more of an openness to the films that we choose, so that people who see them can come away with different impressions. They're thought provoking, but they're not trying to run you down with certain ideologies."

The films he's chosen put human faces on events and concepts that are too often discussed and understood only via abstractions and sound bites—and serve as proof that film can have an emotional impact without being emotionally manipulative. Rather than a stream of statistics, viewers come away from the festival with images like these:

• An 11-year-old Iraqi boy works in a Baghdad machine shop while harboring dreams of being a pilot.
• Farmers in Ethiopia's Yergacheffe region gather to pray for better coffee prices.
• A Cambodian painter returns to the former schoolhouse where he was imprisoned by the Khmer Rouge and confronts some of the men who guarded, tortured and killed prisoners there.

When viewers start to relate to film subjects—to see them as people just like us—then our experience of the film starts to move beyond entertainment, even beyond information, says Dr. Roy Barsness, professor of counseling psychology at Seattle's Mars Hill Graduate School, who led one of the FF&J panel discussions.

A scene from 'The Camden 28'

"The more we are removed from stories of other people's lives, the more we make up a story about their lives. When we do that, we distort their lives, and often create them as different or as 'other,'" says Barsness. "The moment we begin to see each other as more common than different, it becomes much more difficult to marginalize the other."

For Barsness, the festival's emphasis on narrative films with strong human interest is a sign of its Christian underpinnings. "I'm thinking of Jesus as a storyteller, trying to make meaning through story and through his willingness to listen," he says. "Remember the story of Jesus and the adulterous woman [John 8]. He didn't come with condemnation, doctrine or dogma, he came with a narrative."

Adds Keller: "The exercise of sitting down and watching a movie, and following people through that exercise—it does something for us. We probably aren't going to think about it in any other context. It's a holy exercise, a healing exercise. We don't want to remember or consider traumatic events, but it's good for us, and we're unable to heal without it."

John Updike may have been on to something about the spiritual dimension of movies, but it's safe to say he envisioned nothing as challenging or as profoundly Christian as Film, Faith, and Justice. Just as Jesus called his disciples away from their occupations, a festival like this one calls filmgoers to move past entertainment, familiarity and comfort, to consider deeper issues.

"We want this weekend to have an impact on people," says Keller. "Some people I know have decided to change their buying practices; others have decided to sponsor a refugee family with their church group. But we're also interested in providing a space where those who attend Film, Faith and Justice will be challenged on a heart level, by experiencing life and suffering in other countries, other classes, other circumstances, and be humbled and moved out of the arrogance that many of us have as North Americans. We want Christians and people of faith to take international human rights issues more seriously, and those who are not people of faith to consider what the Christian tradition has to offer modern-day human rights crises such as torture, global poverty, human trafficking and immigration."

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