By Dr. Ted Baehr, Publisher of MOVIEGUIDE®
Mart Green of Hobby Lobby fame produced the feature film END OF THE SPEAR about the American missionaries who were killed by the fiercest Amazon tribe in the 1950s. His company, Ethnographic Media, is continuing to produce redemptive movies on cultural situations.
His son, Brent Ryan Green, has started his own movie production company and has produced two excellent, redemptive short movies that MOVIEGUIDE® highly recommends. These movies, PAPER FLOWER and EN TUS MANOS, reveal the need for the Gospel in cultural situations unknown to most Americans.
PAPER FLOWER deals with a young girl in Japan caught up in one of the worst tragedies in modern Japanese culture known as “compensated dating.” It is said that in every Japanese school, in every class in high school, there’s at least one girl involved in compensated dating. Driven by the desire to have designer fashions and handbags, these girls hook up for one or more night stands with someone who compensates them with the material things they desire.
This movie starts off with a suicide of the father of one girl, who becomes a strong witness for Jesus Christ. Her best friend, however, has been sucked into compensated dating. This tragedy shows the need for the freedom that can only come through the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
Another movie, set in Bogota, Columbia, is titled EN TUS MANOS. It opens with a gang killing a kind Protestant minister as he’s preaching because the gang is angry that the pastor and others like him are leading gang members away from a life of drugs and violence. The gang believes the Christians are stealing their gang members.
One boy, Carlos, is being courted by a gang and has fallen in love with the new pastor’s daughter. When finally designed up by the gang, his first mission is to kill the girl’s father. This is so sad.
Both of these short movies are very well made. They do have tough subjects, but are relatively clean considering the subject matter. It is impressive that someone with this much talent would be making movies that are so desperately needed in our contemporary world.
You may purchase the DVD at Amazon
The films may be viewed for free on Vimeo as well:
Paper Flower https://vimeo.com/40252719
En Tus Manos https://vimeo.com/35228855
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