Film festival screens "Apparition of the Eternal Church" today

Imagine putting on a set of headphones to listen to a 10-minute piece of intense Christian organ music.

If you're familiar with the South, that might not be much of a stretch: Religious music is as common to the Lowcountry as Spanish moss. But for some people, it's a step outside of their comfort zones.

Still, that's what filmmaker Paul Festa of San Francisco asked 31 listeners to do in his independent film "Apparition of the Eternal Church," which screens today at the Arts Council Performance Space in Beaufort as part of the Southern Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers, sponsored locally by the Arts Council of Beaufort County.

"('Apparition') is entertainment, mostly, because it's so fun to watch this group of smart and funny people being either seduced or repelled by the music," Festa said in an e-mail interview. "But it's also a fairly serious-minded investigation into what happens when Christian music hits the ear of the unbeliever."

To shoot his movie, Festa filmed people from all walks of life listening to the composition through headphones while they describe what they hear (the title piece was written in 1932 by French composer Olivier Messiaen, whose music was influenced by his devout Catholic faith).The catch is that the audience doesn't hear the music -- they only witness the listeners' reactions.

Festa was introduced to Messiaen's composition a decade after graduating from the Julliard School, where he studied violin. His first thought was to gauge the reaction of his mentor, Albert Fuller, a harpsichord virtuoso and early music guru. "My second thought was that I should videotape it," Festa said. "And 114 interviews and some years later, I had a movie."

'I was very wrong'

Festa's cast of "cultural characters" includes actors, a dancer, a MySpace icon, a drag queen, musicians, a Korean-American rabbi, a stand-up comedian, a Jewish poet, a playwright and many more.

"The film started out about a piece of music that shook me up and filled me with these exalted, oversized feelings," Festa said. "I thought most people would respond the same way. I was very wrong."

Instead, the film became a documentary about how non-Christian listeners defend their disdain for Messiaen's piece. Festa, a gay secular Jew, said he "suspended disbelief" in Christian theology in order to emotionally experience the powerful piece of religious music.

"I think as a secular Jew my own innocence -- I almost said 'ignorance,' but that would be too strong a word -- of Christian theology and iconography let me feel something big and thrilling, something filled with light and the presence of God but absolutely not inflected with the gore and pathos of Christian martyrdom generally or the crucifixion of Christ," Festa said.

Festa's documentary has received a mixed reaction from critics across the country."Apparition of the Eternal Church" was named "Best North American Independent Feature Film" at the Indianapolis International Film Festival and won of the "Special Director's Award" at the Santa Cruz Film Festival in 2006.

But more than 70 film festivals turned the movie down, and it's taken nearly three years for Festa to land a screening in his native San Francisco.

"People either love this movie or they hate it," Festa said. "In that sense it has something in common with the music it's about. And in the darkest days of this project, when the 40th or 50th rejection came in the mail and I thought it would never screen, I was grateful to have Messiaen as an inspiration and an example of someone who stuck to his guns if (people) didn't like his music or wished he would change something," he said.