“Filming Religion: The Documentary Art of Helen Whitney”
Helen Whitney, Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker
Helen Whitney has spent a long and award-winning career making films. Her credits include Youth Terror: The View from behind the Gun for ABC, The Choice ’96 for Frontline, and Richard Avedon: Darkness and Light for American Masters on PBS. Primarily, however, Whitney’s work has focused on religion and personal experiences of faith. Such documentaries include Monastery, John Paul II: Millennial Pope (which won an Emmy),Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero, and, most recently, The Mormons, which aired on PBS in April and May of 2007. In her current project, she explores the theme of forgiveness.
In this presentation, illustrated with clips from a number of her films, Whitney gave a retrospective of her life’s explorations of religious faith. She considered the allure as well as the challenges of capturing religion and spirituality on film, especially as she confronted these issues in her 2007 documentary The Mormons.