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‘Pray Away’: Film Review | Tribeca 2020 (Hollywood Reporter)

August 30th, 2020Admin0 Comments

Defectors from the religious right’s gay “conversion” therapy programs speak out about the damage inflicted on themselves and countless LGBTQ youth in Kristine Stolakis’ powerful doc, exec-produced by Jason Blum. So-called reparative therapy designed to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity, using religious indoctrination and bogus psychology, has been dealt with in both dramatic features (Boy Erased, The Miseducation of Cameron Post) and comedies (But I’m a Cheerleader, Saved!). Not to mention a fabulous Will & Grace episode from 2017 called “Grandpa Jack” that featured out queer actors Andrew Rannells and Jane Lynch having a subversive blast playing …

‘You can’t walk away from these roles’: ‘Jane and Emma’ star knew little about black Latter-day Saint trailblazer, but she’ll never forget her (Salt Lake Tribune)

October 24th, 2018Admin0 Comments

What, if anything, did you know about Mormonism before accepting this role? I wasn’t that versed on Mormonism. I knew about Brigham Young University and Brigham Young but I didn’t know anything about Joseph Smith at all. Strangely, I had read a small blurb about Jane Manning James. It’s kind of uncanny. It was like, “I know about this woman.” I had encountered a small inkling of who she is in written form on the web two years prior. It didn’t click for me until I was sitting in a hotel on a short film — before I came to …

Faithful selected for the 2018 China Women’s Film Festival

August 31st, 2018Admin0 Comments

Faithful will be screened as part of the sixth annual China Women’s Film Festival in September, 2018. Read the announcement on the China Women’s Film Festival Facebook page.

ReFrame, IMDBPro Announce 22 Newly Certified Gender-Balanced Films (Variety)

August 30th, 2018Admin0 Comments

ReFrame — a coalition of industry leaders founded by Women in Film and the Sundance Institute — and IMDBPro announced on Tuesday nearly two dozen films to be certified for their gender-balanced productions. Reframe launched the data initiative in an effort to recognize and promote gender-balanced films and television shows. The collaboration relies on data from IMDBPro to analyze films and television series to see how many women were involved in the production, and how much screen time female characters had. To earn the ReFrame Stamp, a film or TV show must meet a handful of requirements that call for …

Utah film about Mormon heroines Emma Smith and Jane Manning James gains Hollywood honor for its gender balance and racial diversity (Salt Lake Tribune)

August 30th, 2018Admin0 Comments

A Utah-made film about two famous women from Latter-day Saint history — a determined black convert and the first lady of the faith — earned a place on a new Hollywood list of “gender-balanced and racially diverse films both in front of and behind the camera.” The movie, “Jane and Emma,” tells the story of the unlikely, even risky, friendship between Jane Manning James and Emma Smith, wife of church founder Joseph Smith, in the 1840s as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was facing mounting opposition. The film, with a scheduled showing in Los Angeles next month …

New film ‘Jane & Emma’ captures the friendship between a black convert and the beloved wife of Mormonism’s founder (Salt Lake Tribune)

May 31st, 2018Admin0 Comments

New article in The Salt Lake Tribune about Jane & Emma Many modern Mormons see black LDS pioneer Jane Manning James as heroic. What they may not know is what an unlikely, even risky, friendship the 19th-century free black member had with the first lady of Mormonism, Emma Smith. In an era when tensions over slavery later would explode into the Civil War, Jane and Emma’s personal and religious bond cut across racial and social lines. Their mutual affection ran so deep that both wanted to be “sealed” as family for eternity. Emma proposed the newly announced LDS ritual of “adoption” …

Faithful LGBT Mormon Couple Walking A Tightrope (Huffington Post)

May 25th, 2017Admin0 Comments

Mette Ivie Harrison writes about Faithful in the May 25, 2017 issue of the Huffington Post: Some might wonder what would lead a lesbian couple to try to remain Mormon after the new policy instituted in November, 2015, which stated that same-sex married couples are to be considered apostates and called up for excommunication proceedings, and that their children should be excluded from many church rituals, including baptism. But in the short film Faithful, by Jenn Lee Smith and Dane Christensen, a lesbian couple in the small town of Roosevelt, Utah, is depicted trying to do this very thing. Read the rest …