We've filmed the first half & we need your help to finish the project in October!

Photo of the Filmmakers on Set

WHAT IS THIS?

The film is a cinematic portrait of the crestfallen religious spirit of early 19th century New England through a queer-feminist lens. The project presents historically-based tableaus to offer a look at this group of people who abandoned their abolitionist activism in exchange for a promise of a heavenly utopia.

WHY THIS FILM NOW?

We need better alternatives to apathy. We still live in unjust times, under many of the same structures that were being debated in the 1800s. The challenges we face today still feel overwhelming and finding the will to participate in the world-as-it-is remains a struggle.

Those Who Wait represents a historic community that was actively contending with injustice in the world as it pertained to their own spiritual health. This film studies the dramatic consequences of this early effort.

We are still in an Age of Apocalypse. This film is set in the 1830s-40s: a period in which the bricks were being laid for the American Civil War, the escalation in machines of global war, and the planetary human impact brought by the Industrial Revolution.

In 2017 somehow the idea of a new civil war, nuclear apocalypse, and environmental catastrophe don't seem far off. There has never been a better time to examine the human inclination toward self-eradication. Today's headlines are filled with the public and violent resurgence of white nationalism and the deportation of non-white inhabitants of the United States. Instead of only reacting to the headlines, it's important also to return to these imagined colonial histories and interrogate the source of today's social sicknesses.

By examining the crisis-of-the-soul that the Millerites collectively wrestled with, our inquiry touches both the social and the spiritual implications necessary to face ourselves in the world.