This is not just a film screening. It is an invitation to witness.
Watch Live — Virtual Screening
Friday, April 3, 2026 • 10:00 AM Central Time Topic: The Spiritual Advisor — Good Friday Release
Register in advance
I Stayed. The Camera Didn’t Look Away. Now You’re Invited.
I did not go to Oklahoma to make a film.
I went to stop an execution.
In September of 2024, I drove across state lines carrying something I have come to know too well: the fragile, flickering possibility that mercy might still break through. Emmanuel Littlejohn was scheduled to die. The state had already written its ending. My role…my calling…was to interrupt that ending if I could. To pray. To advocate. To push against a system that rarely bends.
And if it would not bend…then I would stay.
Somewhere in the middle of that journey, filmmaker Joel Fendelman arrived with a camera. Not to sensationalize, not to interfere, but to witness what he could from the outside. The prison walls drew a hard line. Joel could not cross them. He never met Emmanuel. He never filmed inside. What he captured…over five days, from everything surrounding that line…became The Spiritual Advisor, a 23-minute documentary that does not look away from what most of society refuses to see.
At first, I barely registered the camera. When you are walking into prison after prison, sitting across from a man trying to understand his own death, meeting with officials, and carrying the weight of both hope and inevitability, there is no space for performance. There is only presence. Joel understood that…even from where he stood. He filmed what the system would allow: the prayers before I went in, the exhaustion when I came out, the weight that accumulated with each passing day. He captured the strange and sacred reality of this work from the only vantage point the state permitted him. And somehow, that distance became its own kind of truth.
For a moment, it seemed like the story might change. The Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board recommended clemency. That kind of moment can feel like a rupture in the system…a brief opening where mercy might enter. It makes you believe again. It pulls you deeper into hope.
And then it disappears.
The state moved forward. And everything shifted. The work of trying to stop an execution became the work of preparing a man to die.
Brenna Ehrlich captured the edge of that reality in her Rolling Stone investigation, “The Last Face Death Row Inmates See.” She described death row as something like a web…tight, inescapable, closing in. What the film reveals is that the web doesn’t just hold the condemned. It holds the guards. The officials. The witnesses. The systems we maintain. The silence we participate in.
On the final day, it held me too.
I walked with Emmanuel into the execution chamber. I took his hand. I anointed his head. I prayed. And then I stood there as the state of Oklahoma killed him.
Joel waited outside.
There is no way to fully explain what that does to a person — either of us. There is only the choice that comes after: Will you look away? Or will you tell the truth?
Joel chose to tell the truth. He did not soften it. He did not turn it into something easier to consume. As Alexandra Dale, Head of Rolling Stone Films, said, this film examines “the intersection of belief, justice, and conscience.” It does so by bringing you as close as possible to the reality itself…closer, in some ways, than the walls ever allowed Joel to be. That is why The Spiritual Advisor matters. Because it refuses distance, even when distance was forced upon it.
We are premiering this film on Good Friday. That matters. Good Friday is not just a memory…it is an execution story. It is the story of the state killing a man while the world watches: some complicit, some grieving, most uncertain of where they stand. This film forces that question into the present. What does it mean to follow a crucified God in a society that still crucifies?
The executions are still happening. The question is no longer whether they exist. The question is whether we are willing to see them.
Come See
Rolling Stone Films and Documentary+ are premiering The Spiritual Advisor
Good Friday, April 3, 2026.
Watch Live — Virtual Screening
Register in advance
Also screening in person in Little Rock: St. Oscar Romero Old Catholic Church / Quapaw Quarter United Methodist Church 1601 S. Louisiana, Little Rock, AR 72206 — 10:00 AM
Present for the conversation:
- Joel Fendelman, Director
- James Chase Sanchez, Producer
- Rev. Jeff Hood, Priest & Spiritual Advisor
Following the premiere, the film will be available to stream on Documentary+ and through Rolling Stone’s media platforms.
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