The brief: Our lead pastor was preparing a talk on Psalm 137, a poem of exile that refuses to give easy answers about justice, and he wanted a film to go with it. The one condition was that it stay open-ended. We didn't want to hand the audience a conclusion about what to do with our enemies; we wanted them to leave still thinking about it.
The approach: A film that explains a hard question tends to answer it. So I wrote a story that doesn't: a father who suffers devastating loss at the hands of the Nazis during the Holocaust, told in a way that gives the audience the weight of the question without resolving it.
The result: People told us the film helped them understand the passage and the talk. Many reached out afterward to ask which feature film it had come from.
