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The Church has just put out a new video on its You Tube Channel: The Christ Child: A Nativity Story #LightTheWorld, available here . On Facebook Daniel McClellan had high praise for it, so I thought I would check it out.

And I had to agree, I thought the short film was simply outstanding.

There are usually a bunch of clunky things that mar efforts such as this, but the team went out of their way to avoid those common problems. From the very beginning you can see this is a serious-minded effort, as the actors playing Joseph and Mary look plausibly Middle Eastern, and Joseph’s hair and beard are appropriate to that time and place.

The biggest hurdle these kinds of films have to being taken seriously is having the actors walking around speaking King James English. Whenever I see that, for me the actors may as well be waling around in bathrobes and towels on their heads, as all believability is lost. Amazingly, the Missionary Department signed off on having the actors speak untranslated Aramaic. There is not a lick of English in the short film, and that makes all the difference in the world.

David Calabro was the Aramaic consultant on the film, meaning he had to come up with the wording and teach the actors how to say it naturally, and all involved did a terrific job. (You may recognize David’s name from all the suggestions he made in Royal Skousen’s analysis of BoM textual variants volumes.)

At one point Mary sings baby Jesus a lullaby, and it is quite lovely. That wasn’t originally in the script; the producers asked for it at the last minute. David recalls this from his journal:

I looked this up in my journal to get the details right. Here is what I wrote: “On Friday, we again started in the evening and filmed until the early morning…For one scene in which Mary holds the baby, the people from the Missionary Department requested a change in which Mary sings to the baby a lullaby in Hebrew using the words from Psalm 27:1 (in keeping with the theme of the Light the World campaign). It was somewhat humorous, since I had been joking with Brooklyn that they had added a last-minute monologue for her to learn in Aramaic, and then it turned out that they actually had added that—and not only that, but with music!”

A lot of the stuff that people usually get wrong about this narrative was portrayed correctly here. Bonneville Communications/the Missionary Department obviously went out of their way to give an historically accurate portrayal.

This wasn’t a documentary, so there were a few things that weren’t quite historical but still appropriate dramatic choices for how they wanted to tell the story. The house in Bethlehem was implausibly large, but that worked artistically to illustrate the bustle and chaos going in th home and to make it clear that the kataluma (the upper room, not a public inn as so often misundertood) was simply not going to work for the delivery. They don’t try to portray the interview of the magi with Herod, which in my view was absolutely the right artistic choice for so short a film.

A couple of other things I noted: they represent the angel appearing to the shepherds with a bright light. I thought that was an excellent choice; having a human floating in the air would have seemed cheesy to me. And I loved that the sign in the heavens wasn’t a really bright star; the sign was of astrological significance to the magoi.

So if you haven’t seen it yet, I would encourage you to give it a watch. And this is one you can comfortably share with your friends. Take a bow, Missionary Department, for a job well done.

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