Nashville Film Festival

The Tailenders

The Tailenders is another cinematic gem I discovered at the recent 2006 Nashville Film Festival. The best films I saw this year at the festival were documentary films, although I saw several great short films as well. More on the short films later, the question now is: what is this film about and what is a Tailender?

The Movie

The Tailenders explores the missionary organization Gospel Recordings and their quest to spread the gospel to every possible place in the world, unfazed by language barriers or lack of electricity. The name Tailenders is how the missionaries refer to their audience because they are the last to be reached by world-wide evangelism.

Gospel Recordings was founded in 1939 in Los Angeles by Joy Ridderhoff. Riderhoff says the catalyst for starting Gospel Recordings was an incident that happened years ago in a small Honduran village. As the villagers gathered around an old gramophone for hours just to hear the sound, Riderhoff knew that technology would be the key to making her missionary work resonate stronger with the people she contacted in these small villages across the world.

The organization she founded now has bible stories and sermons recorded in over 5,000 different languages and dialects. The company has created amazing hand-crank players, both record and cassette formats, to distribute into remote areas of the world, that often do not have access to electricity.

Rather than concentrating on the religious message Gospel Recordings takes around the world and whether a person that seems to be struggling with just having enough food to eat and maintaining a roof over their head needs a cassette about Jesus rather than a nice warm bowl of soup, the film instead focuses on if the objects and messages brought by Gospel Recordings to these remote areas bring about change in the areas of agriculture and industrial labor and general quality of life for the people residing in this distant places. The film also has fascinating information to share about the science of sound itself.

Another interesting issue that is focused on in the film is that since the missionaries representing Gospel Recordings do not speak the language, they must rely on bilingual native speakers to translate the sermons and recordings. This situation provides an opportunity for mistakes in translation, the translator selectively interpreting the stories and morals that are to be shared and sometimes an outright resistance to the translation. One example of this shared in the film was instead of recording the bible story as one individual was asked to do, he instead recorded a traditional story familiar to his culture, a particularly funny story at that. The missionaries knew something was amiss when they began to play the recording; all the villagers instantly burst into laughter.

The Tailenders is a fascinating look at this missionary organization and into different cultures and countries that are not the most familiar.  The film is entertaining, very even-handed and wonderfully informative.

The film is currently on the film festival circuit but was also selected to be part of PBS’s fantastic P.O.V. documentary series. It will air on July 25, 2006. Trust me, make sure to catch it.

10/10

-Suzie Lackey

The Tailenders

Directed by Adele Horne

Review

Overall 10/10