User reviews

Enlightening film and very well made. It's most surprising to me how much the "school" let the cameras in. Clearly the folks running these types of facilities are not too aware of the effects of their actions, or worse, maybe they do. So sad this happens. I wish I could find out what happened to David and some of the other kinds in the program. I'm glad to see the former alumni are uniting to expose this type of cruelty.

Sorry to the one reviewer who was offended by the title of the film, but too bad. I know good Christians. But so much harm has come to humans in the name of "god," even from those who follow the King James bible. The film's title is absolutely fair.

It is fortunate that producer Kate Logan found in Lance Bass a producer to tell this story and in him the celebrity to make sure the film got made and seen. It's a story that we should all see.

Meet Kate Logan Christian worker and missionary and documentary film maker who decided to tell the story in film of Escuela Caribe, a tough love program with Christian overtones for troubled youth. Ms. Logan thought she would be doing a puff piece that the school could use. What she saw down there shook her faith right to the foundation.

All kinds of kids with all kinds of Christian parents were sent there for a variety of issues. Those that could afford the big bucks to pay the school to abduct their own children had them whisked to the Dominican Republic where the rebelliousness was to be driven from them. Whatever formed that rebelliousness took be it simple disobedience, drugs, sex, general all around hell raising.

The main focus is on David a kid from Greeley, Colorado whose parents learned he was gay and did not want a gay child embarrassing them. So off he was whisked to Escuela Caribe where he was abused and degraded and wonder of wonders it did not take. The young man was in understandable despair, but as it turned out had more intestinal fortitude than he even thought he had and survived the ordeal.

This is a timely documentary where our various states are now dealing with banning conversion therapy for children. The secular world of mental health professionals agree that these conversion efforts at changing orientation was and are still bogus. Hopefully it will be banned across the nation.

It would have a limited effect on a school in a foreign country as this one was located in the Dominican Republic. But wonder of wonders this American funded 'school' is now shut down. Somebody's prayers may have gotten answered.

Kidnapped For Christ is a fine documentary and big thanks go to Lance Bass for using his celebrity status to promote and produce the film and the issue it deals with.

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.

For a little independent free on Prime film, this one really packs a wallop. Don't think reeducation camps exist in modern America: think again. Kids taken against their will and shuttled off to foreign nations where they have no rights: outside the help of US Authotities. Think these are troubled kids who deserve what they are getting? Think again. We're introduced to David who is being hidden from his parents rich friends because he embarrasses them because he is gay. He left the U.S. involuntarily with a 4.0 GPA. What is Tue world.coming to you.

Teach your kids that if they are ever taken outside the country against their will they still have their unalienable rights as free men! Get to a U.S. Embassy!

God help these kids and their friends as they begin their healing process.

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.

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 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.

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.

My dad essentially tried (and still is trying) to force Catholicism on me since birth, but I couldn't imagine what these kids had to go through and how terrible their parents are. Forsaking your own child and not talking to them for possibly YEARS!?!? This is an infuriating film for the truth it exposes. David was punished by his parents because of a way he feels inside. I hope they enjoy hell, if it is real.

Push someone towards religion and they will turn and run as fast as possible, because all I can see now is brainwashed individuals clamoring for something that they cannot properly articulate or even possibly hope to prove. Throw your false condemnations and religious voodoo and I'll walk away shaking my head.

Deeply flawed doccie. It failed to convince me of its claims about the school. Though certainly there are questions about the school's conduct, Kidnapped for Christ doesn't offer any substance to back those. What it offers is anecdotal and even the interviews appear to be handpicked for some hope of controversy. At no point does it do what a proper documentary does: build a broad scope of all sides then narrow in on the flaws of what people said. Instead this was highly subjective and built its case not around the school or its inductees, but the gripes of a small group of pupils.

I'm not defending the school or saying that there wasn't something wrong. But this film is more interested in picking a certain bone than building a thorough piece of investigative journalism. In fact, this is hack journalism - seemingly making something out of nothing. Perhaps there was something, but the filmmakers failed to put any substance to it.

Jesus Camp and Fatherland are far better examples of the dangers of indoctrination camps, as well as how to tackle those subjects. Kidnapped for Christ is just lazy subjective bashing.

It's easy to see what likely happened: a well-meaning college student (Kate Logan) wanted to make a documentary. So she focused on a Christian school that interested her and began filming. During her filming, she became emotionally attached to many of the students who were not all that much younger or all that much different than she was. While becoming friends with a handful of these students, she listened to their stories and felt sorry for them. She went so far as helping to liberate one student by being a courier. That's all fine and perfectly understandable, maybe even admirable to some degree. But it's not an honest documentary told from an impartial perspective. Instead, this is a blatantly biased film that makes huge assumptions to come to conclusions sans any actual actual evidence to support those conclusions. In short, this film is a *not* a documentary but a one-sided op-ed from an emotionally-involved college student who completely lacks credibility.

Presenting this as a documentary is intellectually dishonest and will only appeal to viewers who are as gullible as director Kate Logan herself was. That might sound harsh but look at the facts (which is what documentaries are supposed to do). Numerous school officials admitted - on camera! - that previous abuses had taken place. Nobody tried to hide that. But what current abuse, exactly, was still taking place? As someone who has worked in childcare (including working at boarding schools) for going on 2 decades now, I saw absolutely ZERO evidence of child abuse at Escuela Caribe based on Logan's filming. Hearsay regarding the "QR" is not actual evidence of abuse. Heavily monitoring and even editing letters being sent by the students is not evidence of abuse. In fact, that's pretty standard procedure in childcare. Furthermore, nearly every form of punishment that was filmed is pretty common and most of it actually seemed quite mild compared to many children's homes in the US. Staring at walls isn't abuse. Having to refold clothes that don't pass inspection isn't abuse. Requiring permission to do every last little thing isn't abuse. Going on long hikes isn't abuse so long as adequate water, food, and rest are available. Even the "swats" aren't considered abuse if done properly. As recently as the year 2000, many Texas public middle schools allowed administrators to swat misbehaving children so long as parents signed a waiver. If public schools are allowed to do this in the 21st Century, is it really abusive?

But that's just it: director Kate Logan doesn't know what she doesn't know. She doesn't know what is standard protocol or what is commonplace in children's homes and boarding schools. She doesn't know that "behavior modification" is a term that is widely used and WIDELY ACCEPTED in childcare not just in the United State but worldwide. Why didn't she reach out to other children's homes to see how they operate? Why didn't she speak to public school officials to see what is accepted punishment there? She also doesn't know if what David and Tai and other students were saying was actually true! And she doesn't know ANY of these things because she refuses to investigate or research anything that isn't right in front of her. She just blindly took the claims of students without interviewing David's parents or Tai's parents. Presenting only one view makes for absolutely atrocious journalism and destroys any credibility her documentary might have had.

In the end, I don't think Kate Logan is a bad person at all. I get where she's coming from. I just think she was in way over her head and ended up making a documentary that should've earned her maybe a "C" in a college film class but should've never gone any further than that.