Having worked under Martin Scorsese, Anthony Minghella, Jonathan Demme and in low budget indie with Debra Granik might have pushed Vera Farmiga into the yes I can mindset. Farmiga will do double duty, making her directorial debut and star in the book to film adaptation of Carolyn Briggs’ memoir This Dark World. To be titled Higher Ground, production is expected to begin in June, after Farmiga completes filming in Duncan Jones’ Source Code. If you enter Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master into the equation, it looks like we might receive a wave of anti-faith films.
Scripted by Briggs and Tim Metcalfe (Kalifornia), this is about a pregnant seventeen year-old, married to her musician boyfriend a few months later, by the age of eighteen she found herself with little hope for the future. Then a friend from high school called to announce that she had asked Jesus into her heart.” “That phone call altered the rest of Carolyn Briggs’ life. It began innocently enough – a few minutes lingering on the televangelist stations, a cursory look at the Bible – and soon she had wholly given herself over to a radical, apocalyptic New Testament church. She wore modest clothing, spent hours every day in prayer and Bible study, slipped religious tracts into her phone and electric bills, peppered her speech with scriptural allusions. Her daily life was permeated with an overwhelming sense of the divine – she braced herself for the Rapture each time she heard trumpet music over the supermarket loudspeaker, saw evidence of Jesus in the smallest everyday events. But as Carolyn began to realize that her religion left little room for what she wanted out of life – as a mother, as a wife, as an intellectually curious woman – cracks began to appear in her all-encompassing sense of faith, and slowly she began to question the religious dogma she had embraced for all of her adult life to date.” This memoir is a look at the nature of faith, and the story of one woman’s struggle to find her place in the world.
