The producer of the critically and publicly-acclaimed pro-life movie Bella has started a new project to promote movies that contain the same sort of positive values-affirming message, suitable for movie-goers looking for alternatives to the typical Hollywood fare.
Jason Jones has launched Movie to Movement to move the movie-going experience in a positive direction and he recently sat down with the BeliefNet web site to talk about what he’s doing.
JASON JONES: Well, Movie to Movement is actually the fruit of Bella. With Bella, in order to get distribution, we really had to build out an entire network of support. Even after winning the Toronto Film Festival we really didn’t have distribution, so we just went and built this massive grass roots network of support for the film. And then we found distribution and Bella was a tremendous success both theatrically and on DVD. And when Bella was in theaters, we would pray every morning that women who were pregnant and considering an abortion would buy a ticket. And, after the theatrical release and it went to DVD, I said let’s use these networks to provide DVDs to pregnancy centers.
We started Movie to Movement and our first program was the Bella Hero Program (using money from the sale of the DVDs to fund screenings at crisis pregnancy centers, universities and prisons). But, then I realized, it took us years and a lot of hard work to build that grassroots network that made Bella such a success and I said…there are lot of young people with films that could benefit from this network, films that promote truth, beauty, goodness and human dignity. And I said we need to make sure that those films succeed. And that’s where Movie to Movement came from — this idea that, as a nonprofit, we would promote films that promote human dignity.
But we would also start producing films. The first short film we produced, Crescendo, was just awarded the Crystal Heart Award last week at the Heartland Film Festival.
