Kidnapped for Christ

Mr. "The Gryphon"

This was a scream for help by a student who found a way to get the matter heard, not a Ron Howard production. I was a student there before they moved into the new facility. Things were worse in the old place.

I was abused in ways that would shock you. Criticizing the production while leaving the abuse to continue is disgusting. How classically "preppy" can you be? Kids are suffering and you want to sit in your comfortable world and pretend to be a film critic?

The things that happened to me there are never far from my mind though that was almost 35 years ago now. Your concentration on the production over the message offends me. Why do you think the school is in the DR and not somewhere in the US? It is ONLY because they can escape US laws in how they treat folks. I slipped an unread and un-filtered letter to my parents during the hurricane David situation and they got me out of there - narrowly avoiding a serious confrontation with a young "officer" bent on being a Richard.

Solitary confinement, physical abuse, perpetual mental abuse - it all happened and is surely still occurring. Those that lived through this could tell you stories that would make you weep.

This looks like a half-a##ed documentary done by teenagers. The primary character (David) has people trying to help him but NO MENTION of where his parents are in all this. Also lots of gaps in the storyline. The film could've been cut in half with no loss of meaning.

The film seems to have a viewpoint but has scant support for that viewpoint, which comes across as weak and half-hearted. I wasted 85 minutes on this. Well, 75, because given the boredom and lack of tension, I skipped the last 10 minutes.

A documentary about one out of many so called Teenage Behaviour Modification Programs which set out to change so called troubled teens with the help of good ol' Jesus Christ, strict rules and tough counsellors.

Which might not sound bad to some, but when you look at the people who's there for instance a guy called David who's sent there by his parents solely for being homosexual you have to raise an eyebrow.

And how it can even be possible legally to literally kidnap these kids and taking them there is beyond bizarre.

And the whole establishment just screams religious fanatics cult.

It's a small-scale documentary made by a very small crew and there will probably be made a bigger scale documentary at some point but perhaps it was the size of the crew that made it possible for them to actually come behind closed doors of the camp, although there were most likely many on-goings that the constitution withheld from the crew.

So yeah worth seeing.

This entire movie could be watched while muted, and is clear that this documentary is not biased, it is true. The level of abuse these kids endure on top of struggles already bearing down on them to begin with. Having a stranger hold absolute authority over you in unfamiliar territory.

This documentary is one of the few that holds precedence over fair representation, because physical and mental abuse toward innocent children or "person" in the name of any god is not arguable or debatable. Amazing how close they got to the students and counselors. Thanks to their ignorance, this great documentary came to fruition.

Several years ago, Jesus Camp circulated around as that film that horrified people, especially the nonreligious, when it came to how religion was pushing views on children. With Kidnapped for Christ, Jesus Camp seems like a welcome change.

It's first noteworthy to mention the filmmaker. Kate Logan, a conservative Christian college student in the Dominican Republic for mission work, decided to do a documentary about a school there where American teenagers in crisis were sent. What she found there was teenagers that were woken up in the middle of the night by strangers and removed from the US, sometimes with no one outside their family knowing what happened to them, to be sent off to the Caribbean to have their behaviors corrected. Far from the extremes that one would expect to lead to this, some of them were fairly normal teenagers, all in all, before this happened.

The film goes through the processes of the school by following a few of the 'students' there over the course of the several weeks that Logan was at the school. The reason her background is relevant is because as she continues, she starts to find her own faith challenged, as well as her approach to the film challenged, as she is repelled more and more by what's going on in the name of Christianity. And that's what gives this film so much power.... it tries to take a relatively fair stance, but the sheer weight of evidence is heavy enough that it has a clear conclusion, and it even runs counter and challenges her preconceived notions when she was coming into this situation in the first place. (Indeed, this might have never come to light if not for her background.

So much of the power comes through what the three students she follows through go through, the way they talk about being treated, the fact that they've been sent to a foreign country without a say, and this is a film that I think very few people could watch and not find this upsetting, frustrating, angering, and disgusting.

Logan shines a light on something that I would think most people in America don't even realize goes on, and something that even some of these parents don't realize, to the full extent, what these children are being subjected to.