From Garden State to Grizzly Man, the Sundance Film Festival is all about alternative voices and independent visions. It has championed Native American projects like Smoke Signals, launched gay themed films like Boys Don’t Cry, and discovered cult faves like Napoleon Dynamite.

While Hollywood actively courts the widest audience possible, Sundance embraces the obscure and overlooked. Mainstream American entertainment avoids most religious subject matter. The theology of Hollywood is bland and generic, "Be kind, don’t take faith too seriously." The studios will even sacrifice potential profits to avoid controversy (remember a little something called The Passion of the Christ)?

That is why, as a faith-fueled filmmaker, I thank God for Sundance. Independent filmmakers who explore the experiences of outsiders aren’t afraid of religious issues or controversies. Sundance 2006 featured an abundance of films that took the spiritual, the ethical, and the theological seriously.

Twenty-five film students from Biola University joined twenty-five ministers-in-training from Fuller Theological Seminary at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. We were eager to assess the cultural pulse, searching for signs of life amidst independent film. We came away surprisingly inspired.

My favorite film of the fest came from Denmark. Adam’s Apples was a brilliant, deadpan dark comedy rooted in the book of Job. A neo-Nazi sentenced to community service encounters a minister who refuses to lose hope despite countless family tragedies. Goodness triumphs over considerable evil with a gun wielding Pakistani, a washed up Danish tennis star and an unwed mother also won over in the process. It marks the directorial debut of Adams Thomas Jensen, co-writer of Dogme 95 films The King is Alive and Mifune. Adam’s Apples offers a hilarious answer to the Bee Gees’ musical question, "How Deep is Your Love?"

The Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award went to Hilary Brougher for her remarkably nuanced character study, Stephanie Daley. Although set up as a courtroom drama, it brings refreshing humanity to issues of pregnancy and childbearing. It contrasts an unwed teenager who doesn’t want her baby, with a 40-something professional struggling to bring her baby to term. Stephanie Daley features riveting performances from Amber Tamblyn and Tilda Swinton. Filmmaker Hilary Brougher molds her own experience as the mother of twins into the most insightful and timely portrait of the fear and trembling inherent in childbirth.

Arkansas-born actress Joey Lauren Adams draws upon her Southern roots to create her filmmaking debut, Come Early Morning. Adams and star Ashley Judd’s genuine feeling for the region results in a rare, unaffected portrait of Southern womanhood. Faith informs all the characters’ choices.

Racial and religious tension are treated with surprisingly fresh perspectives in three more Southern stories. Somebodies takes viewers inside the comic college experience of writer, director and star, Hadji. The film unfolds as a series of sketches. Hadji lampoons the white-bred campus Christian fellowship suggesting their initials-- CCC could be a front for the old KKK. Ouch.

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