Russell's first experience with Africa, he says, was as a missionary in Kenya, in 2001, with a Christian organization that spread the gospel through dramatic theater.

After returning to the U.S., he helped write a treatment for a musical film that was sold to Dreamworks, he told me, and graduated from the University of Southern California with a degree in film.

"The dream for my life, at that point, was just to make Hollywood musicals, like Moulin Rouge, and Chicago, and Hairspray," he said during a 2011 conference at Liberty University, a Christian university in Virginia.

While in college, he discovered the journals of Dan Eldon, a young photojournalist who was killed in Somalia in 1993 and left behind a litany of collage-diaries of his experiences in Africa.

"It changed my life," Russell said. "I saw what it was like to look at life demanding explanation, capturing powerful stories."

"I think about Dan Eldon constantly."

He also thought about how that meshed with his faith. His ideas about Christianity were evolving, and his experience as a missionary in Africa had left a gnawing disillusionment on his conscience.

"I didn't like what we were doing, I didn't like spreading the gospel in this way," he said during our March interview. "All the Kenyans I met, they didn't need faith, their faith was stronger than mine."

"That was when I decided to go back and tell a story," he says, "telling it apart from any organization."

In 2003, he and two friends traveled to Sudan, where a decades-long civil war between the north and the south had been largely forgotten by the rest of the world, except for human rights activists -- and a handful of evangelical Christians.

Russell and his friends wanted to tell a story about the relatively Christian southern Sudanese victims of the war, and went to neighboring Uganda to try to find some. Instead, a story about the victims of the ongoing Ugandan civil war found him.

"I really felt God was saying to me, 'Jason, you went on this experience for a reason, and I'm showing this to you because there is a story that I desire for you to tell,'" Russell said in a 2006 newspaper interview.

He had found his mission. Russell would spread the gospel of Jesus Christ, and he was going to do it without talking about Jesus Christ. Rather, his plan was to embody the gospel by, as he put it, "ending genocide." And he was going to do it through a movie.

"The trick is to not go out into the world and say I am going to baptize you, I'm going to convict you, I have an agenda to win you over," Russell said at Liberty University. "Your agenda is to look into the eyes, as Jesus did, and say, who are you, and will you be my friend? Like he did to the prostitutes, to the tax collectors, to the fishermen."

Or former child soldiers. Or American teenagers.

Ugandans, Russell told me, "know Christ far more than I or anyone in the Western world and in the Christian church knows Christ." The Western world, he suggested, treated faith like a "line item."