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Lucy Wilson is a journalism student at Sheffield Hallam University.  She attended the 2015 Sheffield International Documentary Festival and was part of the audience attending the Trust’s “Religious Docs: Who Needs Them?” session.  In this special guest blog she considers the role of religious documentaries today and gives her response to what she heard.

If you happened to be in the city of Sheffield between 5 and 10 June, one thing is certain: you were aware that DocFest, the UK’s largest festivity of documentary filmmaking, was in full swing.

As a student journalist, I was privileged to attend the Sandford St. Martins Trust’s sponsored session, ‘Religious Docs: Who Needs Them?’ For me, I’m not a particularly religious person, so I was keen to understand: why do we need religious documentaries? What do religious documentaries achieve? Probably not unusually for my generation of upcoming journalists and programme-makers, I had presumed that religious documentaries were dying out; to me, the genre evokes memories of my Grandmother perched on her sofa in her slippers singing along to Songs of Praise on a Sunday afternoon.

In the glorious ITV town hall reception rooms, I was stunned to see an audience of around 50 turn up to hear the debate about religious documentaries.

The panel consisted of the BBC’s Commissioning Editor for Specialist Factual TV Martin Davidson, Chief Executive for CTVC Peter Weil, the Insight Film Festival Director Abdul – Rehman Malik, and, trustee of The Sandford St. Martin Trust Roger Bolton. Kicking things off, Roger Bolton said, “By doing sessions like this, we hope to enthuse you.” I couldn’t help but to ask myself how difficult that would be.

Earlier during the week I had undertaken recording vox pop interviews with people at the festival for the Trust and discovered I wasn’t the only person struggling to answer the question of ‘What are your opinions of religious documentaries?’  Until recently, if you’d asked me I’d have said I don’t think I’ve watched any documentaries of the religious genre.  I have seen classical blockbusters like “Sister Act” and “The Passion of Christ,” but I guess they don’t really count.

So where is the opportunity to experiment and develop outside what most people expect to see periodically which is histories of the faith? The panelists agreed there is plenty of scope. “Out of all the specialist genres I am looking at, religion and ethics are by far the broadest and by far the stickiest,” said Martin Davidson, “You can step outside of faith community entirely and look at aspects of the world where religion can bare people on a personal level, a spiritual level but also culturally and politically.”

And here, I could undeniably see his point. Everyone knows that religion is a taboo subject in certain situations. Whenever you bring it up, and whomever you bring it up with, you know that it can turn into a 3-hour debate. Everyone has his or her own opinion.

We heard that the fundamentals of a good religious documentary are the same as those in any genre and go along the lines of ‘Are you doing this in an interesting way?’ ‘Will you bring an audience to it?’ ‘What does it deliver to the audience individual?’

One of the films showing as part of the festival was Parvez Sharma’s ‘A Sinner in Mecca.’ The film shows Parvez, a homosexual filmmaker making the pilgrimage to Mecca as part of an attempt to reconnect with his Muslim faith. In Saudi Arabia, homosexuality is punishable by death and, as a viewer, the film was striking and had me on the edge of my seat. At any time, Parvez could have be caught and executed. This film gave me an insight into religion that I had never seen before. Afterwards a female Muslim member of the audience couldn’t hold back her tears. She said: “The world needs to see this.”

If more people are going to see films like ‘A Sinner in Mecca’ then we need the world of religious documentaries to evolve. So is there a potential for religious documentaries to go online? Yes! Nothing is off limits in the broadcasting world. There’s no getting away from the fact that more and more people are accessing programming through the net.

From an international perspective, Director of Insight Film Festival Abdul-Rehman said: “Over an 8 month period we receive 180 submissions, out of which 90 are pretty good and 60 we’re looking at programming. In a non-dogmatic way the stuff coming from Iran is amazingly good.” Abdul-Rehman is sure that on an international scale, there is space and a demand for these faith documentaries.

We were told that Channel 4’s religious programming practically disappeared in 2013 – with a dedicated spend on religion of £40 million in 2008 being drastically reduced to £2 million in 2013. In 2004 the network committed to 104 hours of religion; in 2005 it decreased to 52 hours and in 2014 only 2 hours of self-identified religious programming was broadcast on the channel. It is clear to see that there is a statistical problem when it comes to religious programming. The optimism of the panel was inspiring, but can religious broadcasting raise its audience figures?

“I think that religious and ethical programming is there for everybody,” said Peter. For instance, Muslims form 4.44% of the population. If half of this population watched religious documentaries, this would create a substantial audience.

After the panel had the discussion, they took questions from the floor.  The first question was for the BBC’s Martin Davidson: “What are you actually doing to engage with my religion (Sikh) and other minority religions?”

Davidson answered that the programme-maker had to ask whether or not a documentary about the Sikh religion could do enough to reach a mass audience. The audience member was clearly not impressed with the answer to his question calling it a “cheap response,” and I have to say, I agree with him. For me, religious documentaries should be representing all religious groups.

Perhaps that’s what is going wrong with religious programming? It is pessimistic to assume, for example, that a Sikh documentary would only attract Sikhs who make up just 1% of the UK population. For me, religious documentaries, like all documentaries need to represent society in its widest sense – representing diverse religious groups. Perhaps this is what’s needed – a variety of religious documentaries in order to reach a mass audience. The world needs to be more knowledgeable and exposed to a wider range of faiths. In this way, it could remove the taboo of the subject and make people less ignorant towards minority groups.

Our thanks to Lucy for writing this blog and for her invaluable contribution towards publicising the Trust’s Sheff Doc/Fest session on social media.  As well as recording the vox pop with delegates, Lucy live-tweeted the session.  If you’d like to tell us what you think of religious documentaries you can comment here, tweet us @sandfordawards or visit our Facebook page.

A full audio recording of the Trust’s Sheffield Doc/Fest session can be heard here. 

Over the past decade Poland has been experiencing what many people are calling a “Jewish revival” – fuelled in large part by a growing number of young people who are discovering their religious roots.  In 2014 Denise Grollmus and Sarah Peters won a Sandford St Martin Award for their moving and inventive podcast based on Denise’s own exploraton of her Polish-Jewish identity.  Here Denise reflects on the experience and her reaction when she found out her podcast had been nominated for a religious broadcasting award.

When Sarah Peters, the producer of Sounds Jewish, told me our podcast, “The Jewish Revival in Poland,” was nominated for a prestigious broadcasting award, I was definitely flattered and excited. But I was also a bit confused. The Sandford St. Martin Trust is dedicated to promoting religious broadcasting. Why, then, had we been nominated?

            First, as an American, I have a very specific and unflattering understanding of religious broadcasting. To me, religious broadcasting is little more than the corrupt world of televangelists like Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham—men with bad toupees who preach fire and brimstone and promises of salvation in order to terrorize their viewers and listeners into parting with their savings. I knew that world well after I reported on Rex Humbard, the father of televangelism, in 2007. The title of my story was “Jesus for Sale,” which exactly encapsulated what I thought religious broadcasting was.

            Of course, that is a severely limited and unfair definition of what religious broadcasting is and can be. But even in a broader sense, our podcast still didn’t strike me as particularly “religious.” Though the piece we made was by and about Jews for a program funded by the London Jewish Community Centre (JCC) called Sounds Jewish, I understood our podcast as a strictly cultural piece of narrative journalism for a general audience of international listeners of all faiths and backgrounds. Not only is Sounds Jewish produced for The Guardian, but also our piece was interested in Jewishness not from a strictly religious perspective, but from a more complex understanding of what Jewishness is as a cultural, historical, religious, ethnic, and sometimes national identity that can not be limited to any one category. Furthermore, our piece wasn’t interested in Judaism generally, but in the reemergence of Jewish life and culture in Poland specifically.

It was also a piece about me. And I’d describe myself as anything but religious.

In fact, my religious background is incredibly complicated. While I was raised Catholic, it was the discovery of my grandmother’s (and therefore my own) Jewishness that had brought me to Poland in the first place. Like many of the Poles I’d interviewed, I, too, had stumbled across my own Polish Jewish roots late in life. My maternal grandmother, who had been born and raised in Warsaw, Poland, had gone into hiding, changing her name and her identity, so that she could survive the war. Even after the war was over, she decided to keep her Jewish identity a secret from our family until I was 28 years old. Ever since she told us the truth about who she was, I’d been obsessed with my family history, the history of the Polish Jews, and the revival of Jewish life in Poland, where I found a community of people just like me.

That’s also how I’d found myself living in Warsaw on a Fulbright grant in order to research and write about this cultural phenomenon. I had been living in Warsaw for seven months when Sarah first contacted me. She had read a story I’d written for Tablet Magazine about Poland’s Jewish revival—a piece that coincidentally did focus more specifically on the religious aspect of this much larger story. There was a chance, she said, that she was coming to Poland to do a story on the subject and she wanted me to tell her more. As we talked for nearly an hour about adult Hebrew schools and contemporary Polish perspectives on the Jews, Sarah asked how and when I’d become interested in this topic. That’s when I had to admit that my investment wasn’t purely academic or journalistic. It was personal. When I was done telling her my family’s story, the line went silent. “You should present the podcast. You should tell it through the lens of your family’s story,” Sarah said.

            Two weeks later, Sarah and I met in Krakow, where we worked 15-hour days interviewing everyone who was willing to speak to us, and then headed to Warsaw to do the same, until we had more than 30 hours of audio. It was very important for us to cover all the nuances of this very complicated story—one with ties not only to the Holocaust, but also to Communism and the fact that Poland was once home to the largest Jewish communities in the world. We wanted listeners to understand the historical conditions by which the Jews had all but disappeared from Polish life and then exactly how Jewish life began to reemerge. We interviewed not only the Head Rabbi of Poland and members of the JCC Krakow, but also non-Jewish Poles who had made it their life’s work to revive and preserve Poland’s rich Jewish history and cultural legacy. We never conceived of it as a story about religion, but as a socio-historical story about trauma, inheritance, and healing.

            Our podcast was posted online on June 5, 2013—the same week that The Guardian was making waves for its reporting on Edward Snowden. Even in the shadows of such huge breaking news, I was extremely proud of what we’d made and I was glad that it was in the world so that anyone could hear it. A month later, I returned to the United States, where my time in Poland often felt like little more than a dream. Then, almost a year later, Sarah wrote me with the news that we’d been nominated for a Sandford St. Martin Trust Award, which we eventually won for the “Best Local, Community, and Online” program.

Despite my initial misgivings about our podcast being defined as “religious,” I eventually embraced such an understanding of our work. It wasn’t simply the fact that we won, but also, after much thought, I finally realized how important it was to understand what religious broadcasting could be in a much broader sense. In today’s world, we sometimes emphasize the absolute divide between the secular and religious to a fault. In fact, much of what we understand as “secular” or “non-religious” has a crucial religious dimension that we willfully ignore in our attempt to see ourselves as rational actors beyond the hocus pocus of religious belief. We fear that by acknowledging the ways in which our behavior, our history, or our beliefs might be implicated in religious thought and traditions, we might be revealed as unenlightened, medieval, or irrational.

But ultimately, what I’ve learned through my own research is that culture is almost always implicated in the religious, both good and bad. To deny this fact is to ignore the whole truth of who we are and where we’ve come from, as well as to perpetuate some of the more unseemly prejudices and behaviors that we’ve inherited from religious practice. After all, though Communist thought insisted on its opposition to religious belief, the exile of Poland’s remaining Jewish community by Poland’s Communist government was not unlike those exiles perpetuated the Catholic Church in previous centuries.

To that end, winning a Sandford St. Martin Trust Award was much more than an honor or a professional accolade. It also offered me the chance to interrogate my false assumptions about what we deem as religious or not. Just as our podcast revealed, things are not always what they seem and it is in what is not immediately obvious that we learn the most about who we are.

Don’t forget, the 2015 Sandford Awards  – for programmes that explore who we are, where we come from and the role that religion can play in our lives – are now open for entries. 

You can listen to Denise’s 2014 Award-winning programme here: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/audio/2013/jun/05/sounds-jewish-podcast-poland