I had the privilege of being able to see the movie Sacred Alaska in the theater last Tuesday. The film has no “official” theatrical release and theatrical showings have been sponsored by churches. This showing was sponsored by Holy Trinity Orthodox Cathedral in Chicago and the showing took place at the Pickwick Theatre in Park Ridge, Illinois. The owners of the Pickwick are also Orthodox, and besides Tuesday’s showing, they ran it on Wednesday and Thursday as well. The showing was followed by a Q&A segment with Silas Karbo, the producer of the film.
First of all, the cinematography is gorgeous. Then again, if a person can’t make Alaska look beautiful, something’s wrong. From the time I was five years old, going to Alaska was one of the things I wanted to do most in my life, and I got to visit a friend who lived there when I was nineteen. It was amazing, and that was just staying in Anchorage most of the time. I’d love to go back and really soak it all in for awhile!
I’ve done bits and pieces of research on Orthodoxy coming to Alaska, so I was really interested to see what the movie had to present. It actually surprised me. The beginning of the film was an introduction, of sorts, to Alaska and to the history of the Russians who came over to make money there. These were not Russian families who were coming over to settle.
The movie transitioned into the stories of some of the monks who came from Russia, both for the spiritual needs of the Russians, but also to evangelize the native populations. Although it wasn’t stressed in the film, a number of these monks died in the effort, but there were a couple who went to almost superhuman lengths to bring the Gospel to the Alaska natives. In contrast to the popular idea of peoples being forced to convert under pressure, these missionaries took a lot of time to get to know the peoples and the languages so that they could present the Gospel in a way that made sense to these particular people. As a result, many of these tribes have remained Orthodox now for hundreds of years.
It’s funny, because the film transitions in a way that’s barely perceptible. As this history is being presented, so is present-day life in some of these tribal villages, along with interviews with people and clergy who live out there.
If I remember correctly, the movie speaks about St. Herman of Alaska, St. Innocent, St. Jacob Netsvetov, and then Olga Michael, who was glorified as a saint in the Orthodox Church just this past November. Forgive me if I’ve missed anybody. However, through these saints, the film gives us a little bit of an overview of how Orthodoxy came to these places, and how its lived in these far-flung locales today.
However, the part that I wasn’t expecting was how the film works to put all of this history together not as something that’s merely “nice to know”, but as a key to a mode of living that is challenging, to say the least. Alaska’s rates of alcoholism and suicide are some of the highest in the country, many of the native villages are incredibly poor while prices are incredibly high, and with access to the internet, for example, the comparison of a “subsistence” life to a “Hollywood” life looms large. I think the way this was handled was really, really well done, because it would have been really easy to end the film with the very common, “there’s beauty here but also challenges, and time will tell which side will win out”. All things considered, that would have been a discouraging ending, but they really used the stories of these saints in a way that was quite uplifting to tie it all together.
As far as a couple of small nit-picks, because I knew some of this history already, I could tell that most of the footage was from Central-west Alaska (Bethel being the any town of any size in that area), Spruce Island, and a couple shots from Juneau. Although St. Innocent spent an incredible amount of time in the Aleutians, and they have an incredible and fascinating history, they didn’t make it out there. Knowing a little bit about Alaska, it really sticks out, because there were all these shots of trees and forests and such and… well, trees don’t grow in the Aleutians because the weather is too harsh. (There’s actually a sad story from WWII about this, when Aleutians were relocated to areas near Juneau to protect them from further Japanese attacks and kidnappings, and these people really didn’t know what to do, having never lived among trees!)
Another very small thing was that it seemed like a couple scenes, like of the forest on Spruce Island, got shown a couple times. I know it was mainly for atmosphere, and the shots were breathtaking, but it left me wondering a little where the movie was going. It’s probably something I wouldn’t even notice the second time around. Also, a couple of the drone shots are slightly shaky; not bad, but enough that on a big screen, I thought, “Yep, definitely a drone shot!”
All in all, it was well worth seeing, particularly how the film got to “everyday saints”. I don’t think that this is necessarily a film that would only appeal to the Orthodox, considering the history and cinematography and modern day parts, but there’s a lot of talk of saints, which a few people have issues with. From what Mr. Karbo said afterward, it’s looking like a DVD/streaming release will happen near the end of summer or early fall. I’m adding a Reddit post here that has the showing schedule, which also seems to be available in a post on their Facebook site – which Facebook won’t let me link to directly.
Breath of Hallelujah 