1004: Documentary Filmmaker Helen Whitney on Filmmaking, "The Mormons", and "Into the Night" Pt. 1

Mormon Stories Podcast

Dr. John Dehlin

Religion & Spirituality

4.5 • 5.7K Ratings

🗓️ 12 November 2018

⏱️ 82 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On this edition of Mormon Stories Podcast, we are honored to interview award-winning documentary filmmaker Helen Whitney about her life as a documentary filmmaker, her work on the 2007 PBS documentary "The Mormons," and her new film about mortality entitled "Into the Night."

In Part 1, we discover that throughout her career, she has maintained a deep interest in spiritual journeys, which she first explored with her documentary The Monastery, a 90-minute ABC special, about the oldest Trappist community in the Americas. Helen followed this film with a three-hour Frontline documentary for PBS, John Paul II: The Millennial Pope, and in 2007 she produced The Mormons, a four-hour PBS series that explored the richness, complexities and controversies surrounding the Mormon faith. Following the Sept. 11 attacks, she produced Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero, a two-hour documentary that examined how religious belief – and unbelief – of Americans was challenged and altered by the spiritual aftershocks of 9/11.

In Part 2, Helen shares intimate details about the making of the highly-impactful documentary "The Mormons." She also provides her non-Mormon perspective of the faith and many anecdotal interactions with LDS General Authorities including Boyd K. Packer, Jeffrey R. Holland, and Gordon B. Hinckley that our listeners will find very intriguing.

In Part 3 we learn about her new project, Into the Night: Portraits of Life and Death, a two-hour feature documentary, featuring fascinating, unexpected voices from various walks of life: old and young, believers and nonbelievers, the dying and the healthy, well known and obscure. However varied their backgrounds, all are unified by their uncommon eloquence and intelligence, and most important by their dramatic experience of death. Into the Nightis a two-part documentary, with Part 1 available now for streaming on Hulu and for rent on Youtube.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Music
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0:46.4	the podcast and building communities and programs of support for Mormons like you. Thanks
0:52.0	for your support.
1:22.0	Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Mormon Stories podcast. I'm your host,
1:31.0	John DeLin. It is November 7th, 2018. We are broadcasting to you live from our studios in Salt Lake City, Utah.
1:39.0	And we are so excited to have our guest today. This is someone, Helen Whitney is someone
1:47.0	that I've wanted to interview, at least for 11 years, if not longer. She is a world famous
1:54.0	documentary filmmaker, several of her documentaries have been shown on PBS and the one that will be
2:02.0	most familiar to our audience is a documentary film called The Mormons, which I believe was released
2:08.0	around 2007. It was a multi-hour in-depth look at Mormonism and as I've gone back to reflect how
2:16.0	much amazing ground and territory Helen covered with that movie, it has informed Mormon Stories,
2:24.0	Mormon Stories podcast and so much, it's sort of been a precursor or an architecture for so much
2:31.0	of the change and issues and controversy that we've been grappling with as Mormons for the
2:37.0	11 years after she interviewed Marlon Jensen, Jeffrey Holland, Poit-Kate Packard,
2:43.0	Dallan Oaks, she talked about LGBTQ themes, excommunication, she interviewed Terrell Gibbons,
2:49.0	Michael Coe, so much richness has come from Helen Whitney's gift to us as Mormons.
2:57.0	Part of what we're here to do is just to celebrate her role in all of our lives and I don't even
	...

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