Waiting for a Miracle
The Damah Film Festival
Andy Crouch
October 1, 2001
At the Damah Film Festival, an awful lot of people were disappearing. There was the homeless man begging for change, the janitor humming "Amazing Grace," and the gardener in a heavenly greenhouse. In each case, Our Hero paused to gaze at this enigmatic figure, then looked away momentarily (or jumped out of the way of a passing car, or reloaded the film in her camera), only to look back and see that HE WAS GONE. Damah, which made its debut in Seattle in October 2001, is a film festival devoted to signs of transcendence, especially from filmmakers representing what the organizers called "spiritual" perspectives. Eighty-two entries for the three-day festival were culled from over 200 submissions. The disappearing person was a kind of leitmotif among the entries-the perfect shorthand way to show, using the visual language of cinema, that something spiritual was afoot. One suspects that many of the filmmakers have been watching Touched by an Angel, and indeed, one of the jurors for the festival was Stephen Simon, a producer for 1998's insistently ethereal What Dreams May Come. Good postmodernists to a man (and woman-women directed two of the four winning films), the filmmakers also made liberal use of homeless and poor people, those durable symbols of the Other, along with the spirit-guides-of-African-descent who have graced so much of our recent popular culture, from The Matrix (Laurence Fishburne and Gloria Foster) to Touched by an Angel itself (Della Reese). In the iconography of uneasily affluent America, angels are usually black, and they wear work boots. But there was much more to the Damah Film Festival than these tried-and-tired devices. The most remarkable feature of the festival's 82 films was their consistently impressive ...
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