![\"amazinglove-a\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/227\/2015\/03\/amazinglove-a.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nAlissa Wilkinson has an article<\/a> in The Atlantic<\/i> under the headline \u2018Can Indie Filmmakers Save Religious Cinema?\u2019 It\u2019s a question that I and others have been asking for at least 20 years, and I imagine other Christian film writers were asking it even earlier (going back at least to 1981\u2019s Chariots of Fire<\/i>, which was distributed by Warner in North America and by Fox overseas but was produced independently).<\/p>\n What jumps out at me, though \u2014 given my interest in Bible films \u2014 is this bit (links and boldface added):<\/p>\n One of the featured events at Sundance this year was a panel on faith-based films<\/a>. Several attendees I spoke with were disappointed that panelists focused predominately, once again, on the \u201cfaith and family\u201d audience\u2014the same underlying market confusion I\u2019d observed all year. One attendee, Ryan Daniel Dobson, is a Christian filmmaker developing a project based on the Biblical story of Hosea<\/b>, in which the prophet is told by God to marry a prostitute, who repeatedly abandons him. A project like this will likely interest many people of faith, but not those looking for a \u201cfamily film.\u201d Like a growing number of Christians who work outside both the Hollywood system and the Christian film industry, Dobson sees films like God\u2019s Not Dead<\/a><\/i> as nearly antithetical to his understanding of what film ought to do and what faith ought to look like.<\/p>\n \u201cSeveral times \u2018faith films\u2019 were compared to superhero movies, where a studio can\u2019t stray from what their fanboy audience wants, because it would guarantee a box office fail.\u201d Dobson told me. \u201cSeveral times, it was said, \u2018We\u2019re doing this for them\u2019\u2014the audience. I find that particularly heartbreaking when said on the grounds of a festival where stories are told with such honesty that it forces the audience to admit they might be wrong.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Hosea, to my knowledge, has been virtually ignored by filmmakers for most of the medium\u2019s history (the only thing that comes to mind is a reference<\/i> to him in The Green Pastures<\/a><\/i>, a 1936 film that reimagines stories from the Old Testament in a sort of African-American folk idiom, but even there, he is never depicted<\/i>), but in recent years there seems to have been a growing interest in him and his story.<\/p>\n First there was the short film Oversold<\/i> (2008), a modernized version of the story which starred former porn star Crissy Moran<\/a> as a Vegas stripper who falls in love with a pastor. (The pastor is named Joshua, which may be a nod to the fact that the biblical Joshua\u2019s original name<\/a> was also Hosea \u2014 or, as it is often spelled, Hoshea.)<\/p>\n That film is available for rent or purchase through Amazon<\/a>, and I highly recommend my friend Matt Page\u2019s review<\/a> of it. You can also see a trailer for it here:<\/p>\n