Description

In For the Love of God, a group of sixty Mormons study the scriptures in a dark room aboard a luxury cruise ship at sea, while the rest of the vacationers enjoy the pool, gambling, drinks, and other activities. The Mormon group is delighted to take in presentations by the likes of John Bytheway and lectures arguing that the Book of Mormon took place among the Mayan civilization. The cruise ship docks and an ethnically Mayan anthropologist and member of the LDS Church leads the group through the ruins at Tulum. He points out where he believes ancient Mayans did temple rituals that Mormons would be familiar with and several symbols carved in the stone architecture that might depict Book-of-Mormon stories. Members of the group describe their feelings at seeing the sites and the narrator, Jake Chamberlain, reflects on the entire tour phenomenon and notions of belief and evidence. When the film was first presented to the public in a big auditorium at Stanford, it got laughs in unlikely moments that have led Jake to reflect on the ethics of this documentary. After the film, Jake will discuss the thoughts he’s had on whether the film is making fun of the film’s participants or providing them an audience to share their heartfelt testimony.

Jake Chamberlain is a fifth-generation member of the LDS Church and was raised in Eagle River, Alaska. He served a mission in Ukraine but is currently inactive. Professionally, Jake is an independent documentary filmmaker and educator. He earned a BS in Anthropology and a BA in Film & Media Arts at the University of Utah (2015), then produced commercials for clients in social impact and the arts in Utah and California. His first film festival premiere was for a short film about the launch of the Church of the Holy Goat near Veyo, UT, called Beyond the Veyo (DOXA Film Festival, 2015). He has since made four short films about LDS faith and faith crises – his own and a friend’s – two of which were made in the MFA Program for Documentary Film & Video at Stanford University (class of 2019). He is currently a film program administrator at Stanford and lives with his Spanish girlfriend in the Mission District in San Francisco. He is working on a feature length-film about his great-great grandfather, Thomas Chamberlain, the founding settler of Orderville, Utah.