Imagine not only believing the world is coming to an end, but wanting it to happen. Eagerly. Then, take it a step further and imagine people with such a mentality engineering American politics and foreign policy to bring about the very thing they seek — the apocalypse.

It may sound outlandish, but there are many well organized fundamentalist Christian leaders and their followers working hard to make this doomsday scenario a reality, an alarming movement explored in the documentary Praying for Armageddon. The film directed by Norwegian filmmaker Tonje Hessen Schei and co-directed by Michael Rowley makes its world premiere Monday night at the prestigious CPH:DOX festival in Copenhagen.

“What they are really pushing for is the destruction of our civilization. It’s quite outrageous and mind blowing, really,” Schei tells Deadline as we sit at a café in Copenhagen. “And I don’t think a lot of Americans realize that the sort of hidden end time Armageddon lobby… that they have real political power. They make up the backbone of the Republican party.”

Among the most prominent of these doomsday evangelists is Pastor John Hagee, who opined in an interview posted to YouTube, “We are in the last days… We are anticipating the rapture of the church at any time.”

If this sounds fringe, consider that Hagee enjoyed access to the Trump White House, and described the 45^th president as divinely appointed. “I believe in the core of my being,” he has said, “that God put this man in office at this time.” Hagee personally lobbied Trump to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a decision Trump went on to make over the fierce objections of Palestinians who regard East Jerusalem as the capital of their hoped-for state. Hagee was one of two pastors invited to the opening of the new U.S. embassy in 2018. 

In case there were any doubt about his motivation to relocate the embassy, Trump told a crowd in Wisconsin during a 2020 reelection campaign visit, “We moved the capital [sic] of Israel to Jerusalem. That’s for the evangelicals.” He added, “The evangelicals are more excited by that than Jewish people.”

Fundamentalist Christians believe that for the Second Coming of Christ to occur, Jerusalem must be controlled by the Jewish people. That’s a necessary precursor to the end times, when the Christian faithful will be “raptured” (i.e brought up to Heaven) before the Earth is destroyed.

According to this eschatology, “Israel has to be strong,” Schei explains. “For the evangelicals this means that the Jewish people need to return to the Holy Land and that the Palestinian people must be expelled from Israel. In their belief, Israel has to claim more land as is prophesized in the book of Revelations.” 

Praying for Armageddon makes the case that fundamentalist Christian groups, including Christians United for Israel [CUFI] — an organization founded by Hagee — are providing both moral justification and economic support for Israel’s expansion into Palestinian lands. These doomsayers watch for indications of the coming apocalypse, but more than that, they are influencing policy decisions that will hasten the fulfillment of what they see as prophesy.

“Everything that happens is interpreted as signs of the end time,” observes Schei, who spent many years living in the U.S. and is now based in her native Norway. “With Covid, with Putin invading Ukraine — everything is seen as something that is moving us forward towards their end time goal. But for them the final conflict is set in the Middle East, so the way they fund settler projects and encourage conflict in this area and in this way adding fuel to the spirals of violence is very, very dangerous. Just the amount of money that goes into it as well, under the [guise of] selling salvation often to very, very poor Americans that are giving money towards megachurch empires like CUFI that then is funding right wing settlers in Israel.”

This apocalyptic ideology has received a warm embrace from many conservatives in Congress. The documentary highlights the work of Ralph Drollinger, founder of Capitol Ministries, who leads regular Bible study meetings with members of Congress and did the same with Trump’s cabinet. According to the Capitol Ministries website, “Good legislation is important, but men and women can hardly be expected to make policies in accordance with sound, Biblically based principles if they are at odds with the author of Scripture… We believe that the objective of evangelizing and discipling political leaders is of the highest importance in the Capital Community.”

“Drollinger, he’s a big villain to me,” Schei comments. “Just to see the whole architecture of how they are grooming top level politicians with Bible studies and giving them biblical justifications and language in order to get their policies through.”

Politics is not the only arena where fundamentalist Christians are attempting to transform society. Televangelist Paula White, a spiritual advisor to Trump during his presidency, is among the adherents of the Seven Mountains Mandate, a movement that began in the mid-1970s with the intent to take over seven “spheres” of society.

“They want to take control of the most important institutions in the U.S.,” Schei says, including education, religion, family, business, government/military, arts/entertainment and media. “There is this mandate and there seems to be sort of an overarching plan that they are working towards.”

Praying for Armageddon indicates doomsday evangelicals are making considerable headway within America’s armed forces. In the film, investigative journalist Lee Fang interviews retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, a former advisor to Gen. Colin Powell, describing Wilkerson as “concerned about the role of evangelical Christian nationalists in the military.” 

“Chaplains are increasingly coming from the fundamentalist sects,” Col. Wilkerson points out. “These evangelical fundamentalist chaplains go to some place where basic training graduates and they say beforehand… ‘These troops are at their most vulnerable. They’ve been wracked and trained to death. Go get ‘em.’” Col. Wilkerson adds that at Fort Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina, “they had something like 70 baptisms… at the end of basic training exercises. And they proselytize and get them, take them down and baptize them and then they’re part of the Christian nationalists.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made common cause with right-wing Christian evangelicals, seeing the alliance as useful to his policies. (Last month, the Biden administration described itself as “deeply troubled” by a reported plan to build “nearly 10,000 settlement units in the West Bank that were previously illegal under Israel law. Like previous administrations, Democratic and Republican, we strongly oppose such unilateral measures, which exacerbate tensions and undermine the prospects for a negotiated two-state solution.”). 

Praying for Armageddon devotes significant attention to U.S. policy in Israel and how it’s being influenced by apocalyptic Christian thinking, but Schei makes it clear, “I’m not against Israel. This is not an anti-Israel film. I’m against a lot what is happening in Israel. I do think it’s really important for us as a world community to look at what is happening in Israel, because we do have to protect human rights everywhere.”

Similarly, the director doesn’t want her film to be misinterpreted as anti-religious.

“I do understand why people have a need for sort of a higher purpose,” she says. “It’s not also against certain people or a personal attack on anyone in the film. It’s more sort of looking at the whole movement and the power and the influence that this movement has.”

Praying for Armageddon is in competition for the CPH:DOX festival’s F:act Award. The film has secured a number of television deals with European outlets including the BBC, and it’s seeking U.S. distribution.

“We are really hoping to get this film out in the States widely,” the director says. “The American audience is the most important audience group, for me.”

“Anima: to give a soul to something that didn’t have it. In stop-motion this is more true than any other form of animation.” This, according to iconoclastic filmmaker Guillermos Del Toro, exactly one week before taking home Best Animated feature at the 95th Academy Awards for his visually arresting masterpiece Pinocchio.

This idea was the crux of Del Toro’s thesis at the 2023 Film Independent Directors Close-Up session “Directing Frame by Frame” on February 26. It was the first of the annual program’s three live events at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills leading up to the Film Independent Spirit Awards on March 4.

Moderated by Del Toro’s friend and fellow filmmaker Jon Favreau (Iron Man, Elf, Swingers), the discussion also featured co-director Mark Gustafson, Animation Supervisor Brian Leif Hansen and Director of Character Fabrication Georgina Haynes. Watch the full panel below and keep reading for highlights.

With admiration and curiosity, Favreau posed questions to go under the hood of the stop-motion process and the highly involved making and animating of Pinocchio‘s unforgettable cast. Using materials such as silicon, latex, and fabric, the Pinnochio puppet was 3-D printed in metal, composed with ball-and-socket joints for the animators to articulate the puppets with more subtly. 

The conversation circled a theme of emotion conveyed in the aggregate of small details. Haynes said, “We’re really precious about making our puppets, down to the last little button that we stitch on. And then we give them to the animators and they kick them around the stages for a few years.”

Every part of the puppet was hand-painted to reveal texture and worn age. But the lion’s share of the animating process was in rendering facial expressions. Using Allen keys to deform the puppet’s skin and change expressions, an “enormous amount of time” was spent figuring Pinocchio’s face. The animation took somewhere around 1000 days, proving the Pinnochio team’s firm allegiance to the time-consuming medium. 

Asking the audience by a show of hands “Who’s interested in stop motion?” Del Toro declared, in good humor: “Animators are weirdos. We’re all weirdos. But out of those weirdos, the weirdest ones are in stop motion. We are really strange people that maintain an art form that is impossible. Studios don’t like stop motion. It’s too slow, too expensive.”

Del Toro says he was able to maintain the integrity of their hard work and swore to the crew on the first day, “We will never preview this movie nor will we ever get a single note from the studio. Everything we do will be protected as a work of art, [so] give us your 100%. And I was able to protect everyone–not a single note.”

He also spoke to the strength of his crew, seeing his role as that to allow his team of animating artists to do their best work: “If an artist feels seen, they’re going to give you 100%. The work of a director is to do self-portraiture but make it so that everybody does that self-portraiture. Everybody will own it.” Of directing, he said: “You are the only one with the hand on the red button,” speaking to a very quick “mind meld” with co-director Mark Gustafson. 

Del Toro saw his animators as performers themselves, granting them total freedom to follow the puppet’s tendencies into “little improvs” that were often very fruitful. It was revealed in clips how the animators would act the scenes out themselves before using puppets to more intimately understand their motivations. “Anybody can move the puppet, very few people can make it come alive,” he said.

The stop-motion technique of Pinocchio became about savoring the lengthy process and believing in the end result, one with a distinctly homemade feeling to it. The team’s widespread commitment to the project fueled an exhaustive effort seeing it through in such painstaking detail. Guided by a belief in reality, the aim was humanizing the characters and showing them more relatable.

Calling attention to everyday, ostensibly superfluous acts such as slouching over on the couch or bumping into a balloon–tiny details albeit requiring several days each to perform–Del Toro cites the Japanese master Hiyao Miyazaki’s wisdom of the craft: “If you animate the ordinary, it’ll be extraordinary.” 

Favreau gave each member of the panel a chance to share some final thoughts. Del Toro relayed his thesis of animation as an overlooked art form: “Everybody [involved] in this project was an artist and everybody in this project was an honor to work with. For me to work with Mark [Gustafson]–one of the great things to have occurred in my life.”

He continued: “To work with everyone and be inspired into understanding that animation has been kept on the children’s table by economic decisions in a large industry that is incredibly reactionary, and that keeps thinking this is a genre for kids and not a medium for art, and to push it into what it is and should be is the best, most malleable medium to execute most everything we want to express and one of the purest forms of cinema, animation is film and we wanted to prove it over and over again by tackling not only the expressiveness of it but the complexity of it.”

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(Header: Pinocchio directors Mark Gustafson and Guillermo Del Toro)

The 2023 South by Southwest Festival just wrapped, and Adobe is excited to announce that some of the top films premiering at the festival this year used Adobe Creative Cloud tools to bring their stories to life.

This post was written by Meagan Keane and originally appeared on Adobe blog on Mar. 20, 2023.

The horror feature Appendage, premiering exclusively at SXSW before it hits Hulu later this year, relied on the Creative Cloud suite, including Adobe Premiere Pro Productions, Adobe After Effects and Adobe Photoshop to edit the film and to create the VFX that brought the titular character to life.

Editor Alex Familian states, “It was awesome that Premiere Pro offered us all the tools we needed to get quick results that looked great without having to send anything to a VFX house.”

Over in the doc world, editor Meredith Perry used Premiere Pro to make important stylistic editing choices to maintain the security of the film’s participants in the documentary Plan C, which also debuted at Sundance this year and takes a look at the organization fighting to expand access to at-home abortion pills before, during, and after the fall of Roe v. Wade. Frame.io was also crucial to protecting participants’ privacy while enabling the team to share footage for review.

Said Perry, “Disappearing links in Frame.io made it possible to have control over who had access to our footage and for how long, and they were clutch as we strove to protect the heroes in our film.”

SXSW has long been a launchpad for some of the biggest films and series of the year. Last year, SXSW was the first to debut awards season darling Everything Everywhere All at Once, which was took home 7 Academy Awards, including Best Film Editing and Best Picture, at this year’s Oscars ceremony. Editor Paul Rogers relied on Premiere Pro, After Effects and Frame.io to cut the film.

Hear from some of this year’s festival filmmakers who used Premiere Pro, After Effects, Frame.io, and more Creative Cloud tools to cut their projects: