Bringing biblical themes to the big screen

Dreaming big can be dangerous when you’ve got an obsessive personality. Once you’ve got a crazy idea, you need to make it happen. That’s a lesson Paul Plett learned after he dreamed of making a feature-length film and then found a community to make it happen.

Plett, 27, who attends Toronto United Mennonite Church, and John Wideman had moved in the same circles of Mennonites interested in creative projects, and when they finally met they decided to make a movie together.

“We started talking a lot and saying why don’t we make something way bigger than we can handle,” Plett says. And so Godart was born.

The film chronicles the journey of two young men, played by Plett and Wideman, who meet on Canada’s East Coast and end up road-tripping across the country together. Through that narrative, the film examines bigger themes. Godart looks at “a particular generation of twenty-something-year-olds who have more access to more things than they’ve ever had, ever in history, and probably have less purpose of what to do with their lives than ever before,” Plett explains.

While the film is not expressly Christian, or even Mennonite, Plett enjoys working with themes found in the Bible. “The parables of Jesus really resonate with me a lot, and the idea of selflessness and selfless sacrifice,” he says. “I’m never going to find that to be an old or tired idea. I think I’ll be using that in my work, you know, until I die.”

For Plett, who graduated from the Toronto Film School, putting together a feature length film was a challenge for a team with few resources or industry connections. They tried to pay all of the contributors something and they had to cover transportation and food on the cross-country journey. The project was primarily funded by Plett, Wideman and David McDowell, who also provided the soundtrack, as well as by Indiegogo, an international crowd-funding site.

Of course, they also called in plenty of favours. “I remember we just . . . asked every favour and twisted every arm we could,” says Plett.

Their work eventually paid off. They completed the film and it won the award for best no-budget feature at the Toronto Independent Film Festival last summer. The film was recently released online at vimeo.com/60519745, where viewers can contribute money to the team by adding a tip.

Although it’s the largest in scale, Godart isn’t Plett’s only completed film. He has made others, most of which are set in the Global South and examine social or political issues there. Having grown up in Zambia and Sudan while his parents worked with Mennonite Central Committee, he’s fa-miliar with life in Africa. In these projects he believes his Mennonite upbringing influenced his work. “There’s a context where I think that grace is required,” he says, “and I think that grace is no better articulated than it is in the Bible and in Christianity.”

Because his creative projects aren’t financially sustainable yet, Plett takes on contract film work with a number of international nongovernmental organizations to pay the bills, since his years of living in Africa mean that he’s familiar with development work. While Plett enjoys working in the development field, and hopes to remain a part of the conversation, his dream is for the creative films to become sustainable on their own.

Without industry connections, however, it’s not an easy road to success. Plett has had to forge his own path since leaving film school. “For what I want to do, there’s no blueprint, there’s no road map,” he admits. “I have to write that myself. I have a really easy time with artistic-type stuff, and the business aspect is more of a challenge for me.”

But completing Godart has shown him that with the right collaborators, and the support of a strong community, it’s possible to do the projects he feels passionate about. “You kind of get the sentiment,” he says, “that if you really believe in something, and you just go ahead and you start doing it, you’ll be able to find a way to finish it.”