Rebecca Duffett spoke with Jim Hannon

Jim Hanon

Writer/Director Jim Hannon has been involved in a number of quality Christian documentaries including Beyond the Gates of Splendour, Miss HIV and Little Town of Bethlehem. His stated goal as a filmmaker is to build cathartic and rewarding moments through stories that can help us understand what it means to be human and more human. Rebecca Duffett caught up with him to find out what makes him tick and where he gets the ideas from.

Rebecca: How did you come up with the ideas of what you wanted to pursue for your documentaries?

Jim: We look at where there are very large social and world issues that can be seen through the journeys of the single person and therefore can be accessible and understood better by all. That might seem like it's pretty diverse because the problems of the world are pretty diverse, but when you are looking for hope and you are looking for a solution, you often find a commonality. The commonality that we found was a faith element to people living in very difficult conditions and yet their faith makes a difference; it makes a difference of how they interact with the world and with each other and even makes a difference to the problem that they live in.

Rebecca: You are quite neutral and objective in the documentaries. Is it quite difficult to be neutral and objective when you are looking at such serious world issues?

Jim: Yes it is; but if you're striving to find what is common in what God made in all humanity, then you have an obligation as a communicator, as an artist; you want to find a way to communicate hope across all sorts of boundaries, whether that's cultural or faith boundaries. You can trust that if your message itself is contemplative in Christ, then it really is going to be universal and can be trusted.

Some of the problems I have encountered are if the language doesn't appeal or doesn't utilise what is traditional within Christian circles, or if the song doesn't present Christ. Within Christian circles, people often feel like it falls short, that it doesn't complete the objective; but maybe we have different objectives. If the objective is to reach out to hope and create longing within a culture, to show that there is an answer that can be lived then you have to do that in a very full context, a very deep sort of human context. I also think that if God can't be seen in those issues then there's something wrong; because if he made the world then of course he can be seen living and working in the lives of people that are there.

Rebecca: Little Town of Bethlehem is very different to some of the more newsy and factual documentaries on the Israel/Palestine conflict. What makes yours a little bit different? And also please could you tell us a bit about the non-violence movement?

Jim: In making a film on the Middle East I was intimidated. I had seen so many films pitting an expert against an expert or a story against a story or a politician against a politician; so we deliberately chose people that had inherited the conflict from their grandfathers and their fathers. We deliberately chose people from different backgrounds. A Palestinian Christian, a Palestinian Muslim and an Israeli Jew, because they found each other through the non-violence movement and non violence overcomes evil without using evil. It is a powerful idea that frees the person who adopts it and then they're able to bring that to bear on an issue.

We were greatly challenged by these three men in their journeys. We also felt like nobody would be an expert as much as the people who lived and grew up there. To see the conflict from their eyes; to see it from a Palestinian who grew up in the West Bank in Bethlehem, to see it from a Muslim who grew up in a refugee camp and still lives there to this day and to see it from a patriotic member of the IDF and to see them find each other through non-violence and find hope, that's pretty powerful. That hope spoke to a greater hope, a greater hope for a civil society and what happens when people on the ground take initiative and find solutions.

Rebecca: Miss HIV intrigued me, because the idea of the Miss HIV pageant is something we haven't seen before. How did you come across that?

Jim: We always look for an indigenous solution, something that's happening within an area that comes from the people themselves. We were down in Swaziland in Sub-Sahara Africa and there was really no hope, it was really desperate. Then we heard about Uganda; we heard about their programme and how they reduced HIV infections and how that started with their leadership. One of the things they included was abstinence. Abstinence among AIDS policies internationally is a bad word and is a word that represents a moralistic approach or the restricting of rights. Yet in a pandemic, that's a sexually transmitted disease, you would think that not having sex would be the first line of defence for not getting AIDS and abstinence is a practical solution. To see that it was fraught was very interesting.

We found that stigmatism was really the huge issue; it's a pandemic among the general population and nobody wants to talk about it. If you have it you don't tell anyone and it just grows in that secrecy.

We found the Miss HIV pageant in Botswana; you have to be HIV positive to enter this beauty pageant. This idea of what a beauty pageant is and the idea of using that in a sexually transmitted disease just rocked my world and my heart. I wanted to explore it. Stigma is such a bad problem, that people have to have a pageant to affirm that you can say what this is; you can face it. Botswana has the highest HIV rate of infection among pregnant women - 30% of a population. It's a staggering number. For them to fight it that way was very interesting, because what I saw happening in Uganda was a stigma against an abstinence component to fighting AIDS.

The stigma cuts both ways here; there's this moralistic judgement of people that have AIDS and then there's secular judgement of abstinence. There's a moralistic basis for fighting it and look at all the people that are dying; look at what's going on. Exploring the AIDS pandemic from an ideological standpoint and showing that stigma is something that is costing lives on either side was really what that film became all about.

Rebecca: What sort of response have you had to your work?

Jim: Among secular colleges and universities it's a pretty positive response, because a student audience is really open to solutions. They're really open to changing the status quo and finding new solutions and they're better at crafting a more respectful sense of humanity to others. They don't see people as enemies as much as some of the older populations that are entrenched in the different ideologies. Among secular universities the discussion afterward is very stimulating and we are able to talk about the faith component to it, because we're able to show relevance; we're able to be very honest about all sides of an issue.

An older audience or an audience that's more entrenched in a certain set of languages within the church are hesitant about our films. Sometimes they don't even like them, because of what I said earlier. They feel that they fall short of representing the whole of Christ. It's an interesting place to be and I think the younger generations and students that want to engage the issues need to be informed of the holistic picture and to see that they can have these aspects of their faith and they can live these aspects of their faith and that can make a significant difference in global issues.

Rebecca: What projects are you going to be doing in the future?

Jim: I'm currently working on a film called Columbine Everywhere; it's about school shooting around the world. We interviewed a survivor from Columbine. I also went to Australia, Norway, Germany, Argentina and Canada and inside a prison and interviewed eight people who had experienced school shootings. Then I entered them altogether as one story so that they all get up and they all face the day and they all encounter this core and then they all struggle with the aftermath of it. I wanted to see this idea that faith is taken away from us by other people, but it can be restored and it needs to be restored by other people. In doing it this way we see all the common similarities to humanity in all those forms around the world. Yet you see this commonality of hopelessness that's lost by others and the hope that's restored when a community gets behind it. I think that's a metaphor and a good reflection of what the church needs to be.

You can buy all five of Jim Hanon's DVDs from Cross Rhythms Direct.