Join Us

Last night, David took me to see Join Us, a documentary that's part of the LA Film Fest in Westwood, about cults in America. The film was shown in the Billy Wilder theater at the Hammer Museum. The theater is all pink inside and has these crazy lights like stars over you that made me feel a little crazy to begin with, but it was cool.

It's about brainwashing and mind-control in our country overall, but it follows families that are trying to recover leaving their church in South Carolina. It's this really intimate, insightful look into how so many small Christian Churches slowly evolve into cult status without realizing it - and I had no idea how many such tiny operations exist here - apparently America is the number 1 breeding ground of cults in the world, and it's really not shocking when, as the director put it in the after Q&A session, you consider the 2004 election.

She described her movie as picking up a rock in America to see what was crawling underneath. You mostly felt for the children in the movie, the particular church they were in practiced heavy child abuse, to drive out the inherent demons in all children. Beating 3 month old babies, making the kids run in circles until they vomited, and then beating them with PCV pipes to keep them running, it was heartbreaking. Also, they interview and spend a lot of time with the Pastor and his wife, and it allows you to also see their humanity and them trying to deal with loosing what they very much considered to be their family of diciples. Here's a link to the site where you can watch the trailer: http://www.joinusthemovie.com/mainflash.html