Blessed Child (2020)
dir. Cara Jones
Rated: N/A
image: ©2020 Naked Edge Films
Journalist and short-film producer Cara Jones chose as her first feature-length film to explore intensely personal subject matter in the documentary Blessed Child. Jones serves as the director, co-writer, and central subject in a film that documents her long process of walking away from her religion – what she now regards as a cult – while struggling to not do the same thing to her family. The film is a good first effort and is told in such a personal way that it couldn’t have been made by anyone else. The director’s unique perspective on the life she abandoned is the movie’s greatest strength.
Jones’s parents became devout followers of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church (a.k.a. the “Moonies”) and she, like many children raised in religious households, was a true believer in her family’s faith. At first glance, the Unification Church looks like a branch of standard Christianity. Reverend Moon – who died in 2012 – taught a belief in the God of the Bible and that God’s love was perfect and could solve all the world’s problems.
The small religion, which started in South Korea, really took off in the mid-1970s, especially in America. The Unification Church preached a feel good, heal-the-world message that spoke to many people looking for a new direction in the aftermath of the hippie movement. Unlike many religions, Moon encouraged interrace marriages. He believed that mixing every race, culture, and faith would lead to a harmonious, unified world.
Moon taught the standard creation story of Adam and Eve falling from grace when they ate from the tree of knowledge – meaning that they had sex out of wedlock, in Moon’s interpretation. This led to a corrupted world, which Jesus Christ tried to save. This is where the Unification Church breaks from standard Christianity. As taught by the Unification Church, Jesus was unsuccessful in saving mankind, because he was crucified before he could do so.
Conveniently – for Moon, at least – God spoke to the reverend and told him that Moon was the second messiah, and that his teachings would lead to a true understanding of God. Moon and his wife were wiped of their original sin by God, making them the “True Father” and “True Mother,” since Adam and Eve had fallen. They were the “True Parents,” and their followers were the “True Family.”
The Moonies are very strict about abstinence from alcohol, drugs, and premarital sex, and Jones was a model citizen. She documents her own fervent belief as a young person, leading group prayer meetings and looking forward to the day when Moon would match her to a complete stranger for marriage. Moon performed this service for every member of his church for several decades. He also performed mass weddings, hundreds of couples at a time, in giant ceremonies that took place in outdoor stadiums.
It was the unhappiness Jones experienced after her arranged marriage that made her begin to question her faith. It also didn’t help that Moon was exposed in several scandals, one involving an affair that produced a child, another that involved tax evasion and profiteering from his church members.
The conflict at the heart of Blessed Child is Jones trying to hold on to her relationship with her parents – who are both still devout Unification Church members – as she walks away from everything that they, and the church, taught her. Like any good apostate, Jones examines how the church teachings that she accepted without question when she was a believer were actually destructive to her life. Along with hundreds of other Moonie children, Jones was essentially abandoned for months at a time to a nanny as her parents fulfilled the Unification Church’s missionary requirements.
Jones’s family is personally affected by one of the church’s most harmful teachings. The Unification Church believes that homosexuality is a sin – the movie includes a description of one church leader giving a speech in which he talks about lining all homosexuals up and shooting them – and one of Jones’s brothers, Bow, is gay. Blessed Child documents Bow’s struggle with his identity.
We see home-movie footage of Bow attending a church seminar in South Korea – what amounts to a voluntary re-education camp – in an attempt to banish the evil spirits that the church told him were causing his sexual perversity. Even at 35 years old and as an out gay man, Bow is still uncomfortable with the fact that he’s gay. We get the impression that he would wish his sexuality away if he could, because of the guilt and shame that the church instilled in him as a child.
The most heart-breaking moment of the film comes when Cara Jones interviews her father about the church’s teachings and how he squares them with the love he has for his son. Jones’s dad does a tortured tap dance about how the second-generation Moonies are more accepting about homosexuality than the first generation was; it’s getting better, he insists. In this moment, we’re desperate for him to have a revelation about how harmful his faith really is, but the revelation never comes.
What’s most frustrating about Blessed Child are the things Cara Jones leaves off the screen. Jones talks about hoping she would be paired for marriage with one of Reverend Moon’s own children – the Jones family was one of the most prominent non-Korean families in the Unification Church. She details knowing the Moon family, and handing her profile information to Moon personally so that he could select a suitable mate for her. The movie never mentions it again, though, beyond her initial hopes. She is paired with an ordinary member of the church – who she later divorced – but we don’t learn very much about him, presumably because he wanted nothing to do with the documentary.
Jones also elides much of the personal journey she took between the time her faith started to crumble, which began, like most of us, when she was in college, and her decision to make the movie. The director’s statement that comes with the press material for the film opens by saying that Jones was at Burning Man, trying psychedelic mushrooms for the first time, when she learned that Reverend Moon had died. This tantalizing tale, like most of her de-conversion process, is left unmentioned in the film.
I finished Blessed Child feeling like I only knew half of Cara Jones’s story when it came to her escaping the cult in which she was raised. She does, however, document with a raw openness and vulnerability her desperate attempt to keep her family even as she walks away from the religion that they still hold dear. Blessed Child is ultimately an effective example of a very personal kind of storytelling.
Why it got 3.5 stars:
- Blessed Child is a deeply personal project, and its subject (and director) opens herself up to be completely vulnerable. The movie is a little rough around the edges, but it’s ultimately very enlightening and moving.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- Speaking of it being a bit rough around the edges: there are a few editing choices in the documentary that left me perplexed. At one point, the camera is in the car with Jones as she drives to an interview. She asks her cameraperson (her brother, Bow, who also served as cinematographer on the film) if she should look at the camera or at him while she’s talking. I’m guessing they thought it would serve as a way to signal to the audience that she is being completely open, but moments like that just make it look like the filmmakers don’t fully know what they’re doing.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
- Blessed Child is available on iTunes, Amazon, and Google Play. I was able to see it via a screening link from the film’s marketers.