By Peter T. Chattaway

FESTIVAL season is upon us once again, and films that tackle themes near and dear to the heart of the Christian moviegoer are making the rounds from Toronto to Telluride.

Alas, only a few of those films will be coming to this year's Vancouver International Film Festival, which runs October 1 - 16. Titles like Agora, Vision, Creation, Tsar, Hadewijch and Cleanflix have piqued my interest ever since reviews began trickling in from around the world, but they won't be coming to our corner of the Pacific Northwest just yet.

That being said, with over 350 movies on this year's schedule, the festival cannot help but feature a number of noteworthy films that touch on spiritual themes.

The only film I was able to see in advance that put Christian themes front and centre was, admittedly, one of the more negative specimens. The Spanish film Camino (October 9, 11, 14) concerns a terminally ill girl whose mother is a devout member of Opus Dei, the conservative Catholic group that was cast as the villain in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code.

As the girl lies dying in the hospital, she has vivid fantasies of being an actress and playing with her boyfriend, among other things -- but her mother, who believes the girl's suffering is a gift from God, interprets nearly everything her daughter says and does as a sign of religious devotion, the better to improve the girl's chances of canonization.

Other films, which I did not see in advance, sound a bit more promising.

Letters to Father Jacob (October 1, 11, 15), for example, concerns a tough, skeptical female ex-con who helps a blind, elderly pastor answer his mail. The film, which hails from Finland, is being billed as a story about "redemption and self-forgiveness".

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I am also intrigued by the Australian film My Year without Sex (October 10, 13), which concerns a woman who has to abstain from marital relations after a brain aneurysm almost kills her. Along the way, she meets a former pop star who has since become an Anglican minister; one critic wrote that "even non-believers will likely warm to this sweet survivor who helps Natalie approach the many meaning-of-life issues arising from her brush with death."

Turning to other faiths, I did get to see a documentary called Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam (October 3, 5), which offers a fascinating look at young North American Muslims -- most significantly a convert named Michael Muhammad Knight -- whose rebellion against both mainstream culture and the pieties of their fellow Muslims might ring a bell or two for anyone familiar with the fringes of the Christian rock scene.

It should be noted that these musicians are not out to promote the faith, per se, and indeed, for some of them, being Muslim is more a matter of ethnicity or politics than religion -- so their songs tend to be, shall we say, earthier than the Christian-rock analogy might suggest. As Knight puts it, "In the so-called war of civilizations, we're giving the finger in both directions." But Knight and others depicted in the film do genuinely wrestle with how to balance their faith and their culture.

Also worth a look is Defamation (October 1, 4, 5), Israeli director Yoav Shamir's search for signs of anti-Semitism around the world. Shamir, who says he has never experienced any prejudice himself, suggests that Jews both in Israel and abroad have exaggerated the threat of anti-Semitism in ways that are not healthy -- but he also stumbles across examples of it in some rather unexpected places. Definitely a provocative conversation-starter.

I hope to see plenty of other films in the next few weeks. I will be posting brief notes on the festival and the films I see at the Christianity Today Movies Blog.

October 1/2009