{"id":106,"date":"2010-06-17T16:13:00","date_gmt":"2010-06-17T16:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mediaforsocialchange.wordpress.com\/2010\/06\/17\/the-revealed-truth-an-introduction"},"modified":"2016-07-24T21:46:03","modified_gmt":"2016-07-24T21:46:03","slug":"the-revealed-truth-an-introduction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/2010\/06\/17\/the-revealed-truth-an-introduction\/","title":{"rendered":"The Revealed Truth: An\u00a0Introduction"},"content":{"rendered":"
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During my last week in Uganda a traveling evangelical crusade camped out in the playground across the street from my house.\u00a0 All of Kiwangala, from my neighbors to the motorcycle-taxi guys, came out to see the preachers.\u00a0 It was free entertainment for a population that lives off of a dollar a day.\u00a0 Uganda is strongly Christian.\u00a0 In fact, a year earlier in the very same playground, a network of village churches called The Shepherd’s Fellowship<\/em> performed a passion play on the life of Jesus Christ.\u00a0 It was titled The Revealed Truth<\/strong>.\u00a0 The pastors asked me to videotape the event.\u00a0 The night pictured above was the premier of the film I edited together.\u00a0 I gave a DVD to the traveling crusade and they projected the movie, drive-in style, on a large sheet.\u00a0 Among the audience were the actors of the film watching themselves, most seeing themselves for the first time on video, in the field where they had acted.<\/p>\n

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Back in America, I was leafing through my old Art History 101 textbook and found Veronese’s Feast in the House of Levi<\/em>. He painted this for some nuns whose copy of Titian’s Last Supper<\/em> was burned in a fire. Last Suppers were a popular theme at the time and Veronese whipped them up a new one.<\/p>\n

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What makes this painting unique are its small details. Veronese painted dwarves, Huns, dogs, a cat, a man with a bloody nose, and drunks breaking bread at Christ’s final meal. The hall of the banquet looks out on a Venetian piazza.<\/p>\n

It was enough to get Veronese summoned by the Inquisition<\/a>. Veronese quickly repented, changed the title from The Last Supper<\/em> to Feast in the House of Levi<\/em>, and thus ushered in a secular age of art.<\/p>\n

The Revealed Truth<\/strong> is a little like the Feast of Levi. <\/em>It contains elements of the modern world that gives away the date and place of performance and creates a snapshot of Sub-Saharan Africa in 2009.\u00a0 The film becomes a zeitgeist by inadvertently documenting the available technology and belief systems that dominated the community at the time.\u00a0 Often, the most interesting parts of the movie are not the miracles of Jesus, but the villagers who are watching the play unfold.<\/p>\n

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Kiwangala, Masaka is in the heart of the Buganda tribal kingdom <\/a>and its people are mostly subsistence farmers and fishermen.\u00a0 Their lifestyle is in many ways more similar to the characters of Biblical times than those of the developed world.\u00a0 They relate to the parables of Jesus quite literally.\u00a0 Jesus’ story of the farmer who sowed seed in different types of soil is not just an allegory of church building, but good agricultural advice.\u00a0 Even the title of President Musevini’s autobiography<\/a> borrows from the parable of the mustard seed.\u00a0 Agriculture and fishing is not just the occupation of most Ugandans, but the core of the country’s identity and how it has embraced Christianity.<\/p>\n

A Note on the Soundtrack and Some History of the Production<\/span>
\n\"\"<\/a>The film’s soundtrack made this one of the most challenging and time-involved movies I’ve worked on.\u00a0 The play is performed in Luganda<\/a>, the local language.\u00a0 The pastors’ plan was to record the actors before the performance.\u00a0 The actor’s were supposed to lip-sync to the recording as it played over a PA system.\u00a0 I recorded the players in a kind of radio theater reading of the play with the Garage Band program <\/a>and my laptop’s internal microphone.\u00a0 The audio came out great, but was a complete disaster when it was performed because the speakers had to compete with the blaring of the electric generator.\u00a0 The actors ended up pantomiming.\u00a0 It took me the better part of a year to re-sync the soundtrack back to the video and then go back and add the subtitles.\u00a0 However, I learned a lot about Luganda from the experience.<\/p>\n

The music is an eclectic group of tracks that I collected in large part from the guys who sold bootleg mix tapes around the Masaka and Kampala taxi parks.\u00a0 The film includes traditional, religious, classical, pop, R&B music from Uganda, East Africa, and beyond.\u00a0 A local DJ’s CD intended for weddings, graduations, birthdays, and discos provides the movie’s sound effects.<\/p>\n

The Revealed Truth Blog Series<\/span><\/p>\n

This post is the first of a nine part series that takes an in-depth \"\"<\/a>look at the The Revealed Truth<\/strong> and how rural Ugandan culture influenced the making of the film.\u00a0 The\u00a0 movie is about an hour\u00a0 long\u00a0 but I’ve broken it down into 5 to 10 minute blog-size episodes.\u00a0 The next post will feature the nativity and Jesus meeting the fishermen<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During my last week in Uganda a traveling evangelical crusade camped out in the playground across the street from my house.\u00a0 All of Kiwangala, from my neighbors to the motorcycle-taxi guys, came out to see the preachers.\u00a0 It was free entertainment for a population that lives off of a dollar a day.\u00a0 Uganda is strongly …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":1243,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[207,222,278,284,352,383,404,432,519,136,569,538],"class_list":["post-106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-buganda","tag-christ","tag-evangalist","tag-feast-in-the-house-of-levi","tag-jesus","tag-luganda","tag-movie","tag-passion-play","tag-the-revealed-truth","tag-uganda","tag-uncategorized","tag-veronese"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1244,"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106\/revisions\/1244"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jplarroque.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}