Zions Indie Film Festival 2023
After 21 years as the LDS Film Festival, the festival has a new name: Zions Indie Film Festival. This name change, say the new owners and directors, Michelle and Marshall Moore, is to communicate that the festival explores more than LDS themes. The 2023 festival ran from March 15-18 in Orem, Utah, with over 85 full-length, short and documentary films.
The opening night featured the world premiere of His Only Son, the story of Abraham and Isaac from Angel Studios, producers of The Chosen, which opened on almost 1,800 screens across the nation the following weekend. Breaking into Beautiful, a documentary about Kim White, who shared her six-year battle with cancer on Instagram, sold out its screening and won Best Documentary. The 2015 short, Court of Conscience, starring Jon Voight and the late Anton Yelchin, and written and directed by Voight’s son, James Haven about a cardinal and a priest and abuse in the Catholic church had surprise appearances from both Voight and Haven. A new program was Friday night’s “Reality Benders” consisting of all horror short films. Luis Puente’s short, I Have No Tears, and I Must Cry, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, was just one of a number of films by international filmmakers.
Among the many presentations were “Christ over Career” with evangelical filmmakers Cameron and BJ Arnett, which argued for putting Christ at the helm of one’s career in cinema, and filmmaker Barrett Burgin’s “Five Pillars for a New Wave of Latter-day Saint Cinema” that explored the potential compelling future for a new kind Latter-day Saint film movement. There was even a reading of an unproduced script: Marshal Davis’s El Misioñero, an action-thriller-spiritual story about three LDS missionaries serving in Mexico who are caught in a violent drug cartell’s attack on a small town.
With nearly 6,000 people in attendance, Zions Indie Film Festival looks like it will continue the LDS Film Festival’s legacy of exploring intersections of faith and film far into the future. — Jeff Parkin
