LAMENT
Screenplay | Drama | 90 minutes
by Eric Pauls | ericjamespauls@gmail.com | 403.918.3970
An evangelical church community begins to implode after they find out their pastor has secretly officiated a gay marriage. In the following week, they must learn to love their neighbours before they destroy everything they claim to care about.
Synopsis
Taking place over the span of one week, LAMENT follows several members of a church, including its leader, Pastor Tom, who has secretly officiated his sister’s marriage to a woman. When this is discovered, the reaction from the church is drastic and divisive, setting in motion a series of events that will have dire consequences.
As the congregation tries to extinguish Tom’s growing pro-LGBTQ+ stance, underlying issues in the community go unnoticed. Nathan, a handsome and married youth pastor, is involved in a predatory relationship with seventeen-year-old Alex, a member of the youth group he leads. Luke, Tom’s son, is burdened by being the “pastor’s kid” and is set on a self-destructive path fuelled by extreme bouts of apathy and doubt. Ed, Alex’s father and one of the congregation’s elders, is determined to hold on to his traditional beliefs while he is faced with the impermanence of life as his wife slowly dies of cancer.
By the following Sunday, everything culminates, lives are changed, and Tom is forced to choose between the Church he has always loved and the people in his life who need him the most.
DIRECTOR’S NOTES
Having grown up in the evangelical church this story is inspired by my own experiences. It is a story about good people being corrupted by an institution of power and it is an important story I desire to share. I myself approach the story from both a place of contempt and disillusionment, but also empathy for a group of people desperate to hold onto their community and what they find their meaning in.
Being raised an evangelical, I witnessed this community feed the poor, give to the needy and provide people with a sense of purpose and belonging. I grew up surrounded by people who cared for my well-being and the welfare of the world around them. This upbringing was largely positive. However, I also saw the dark side of this institution as having the correct interpretation of scripture became paramount above all things. "Sin" was hidden away and never spoken of unless it was to shame and condemn. Friends of mine developed anxiety and depression as they tried to hide what they perceived as their sinful nature. To believe you are born a sinner, unfit to be in God's presence, is a heavy burden to bear and though the church members would say they were free from sin, the fear that they could become separated from God created a culture of shame and guilt that corroded everything.
It is this juxtaposition between loving thy neighbour and judging thy neighbour that I derived my story. I have sat in a pew and listened to a congregation demand the resignation of a pastor who affirmed gay marriage. I have been part of a youth group run by a pastor who carried on several affairs with women in the church, including a recent high school graduate, but I have also seen kids from broken families be loved unconditionally and a family who tragically lost their son in a car accident be carried through hard times by their church family. It is the two sides of this story I want to share in Lament.
I began writing this script as an act of catharsis, but as it got into the hands of others who devoured it with enthusiasm and excitement it began to take on a life of its own. As colleagues have read the script, I’m seeing it impact them in a way I have not seen other scripts do. This tells me I have a film that will connect deeply with a large audience, and it is their enthusiastic, charged, response that inspires me to invest my whole self into telling this story.
MOOD REEL
A mock trailer that convey the feel and tone of the film.
Visual Style
We’re bringing Art House to the Church - Not just by observation, but by going inside the scene, placing the camera between the actors, and bringing out the humanity of each character. By doing this we hope to push past the cliché our church setting provokes and show a more profound level that viewers can engage with. This may seem like a simple idea but for a member of a church to be portrayed as a complex, intelligent, broken individual, opens the audience up to the reality of a church community that has so rarely been seen on screen.
Colour and light will be used to create transcendence, allowing us to reframe and illuminate a setting and topic so mired in cliché. The church will be a sublime fever dream of pastels, golden sunlight, and velvet shadows. There will be dark reds and glistening, rich perspiring skin tones of the people carrying the burden of holiness on their shoulders.
Finally, the film's cinematography will heavily rely on perspective. Given its ensemble nature, the script has already been intentionally broken into the perspectives of a specific character in each scene. For example, our opening scene shows Luke in the back alley burning pornography in an ill attempt to “save his soul” whilst his parents put away the groceries inside. In this instance, the scene is about Luke’s decision and emotional state in that moment, so at no time will the camera enter the house, and the audience will only be given glimpses of the parents through the window. That is, until Luke runs off and the fire becomes Tom’s problem to deal with. This style will be consistent throughout the film, even in scenes where several characters are in the same room. Every scene in the script is about a moment in a certain character's life, so this intentional framing that places the viewer in the room with them is key in tracking the plot and their emotional journey.
LEAD CHARACTERS
TOM SCHULAR (43)
Mild-mannered and slow to anger. He is the Senior Pastor of the church, father to Luke and Elle, and husband to Jamie. Since his Sister came out over a decade ago, he has slowly come to accept her lifestyle and recently he has officiated her wedding but has kept this all a secret from his church. It is only when he is found out and the issue is forced to the surface that he begins to see the negative effect of the church’s suppressive tendencies on the people he loves, and his complicity through his silence.
NATHAN BALLARD (29)
Charismatic Youth Pastor and husband to Kim. The charming and good-looking star of the church is loved by all, but the evangelical sexual repression he was raised with and his narcissistic tendencies reinforced by his position of power have turned him into a sexual predator. Preying on Taylor, a high school girl in his youth group, he carries on an affair with her under the noise of the entire church and when he senses he may be caught he attempts to save himself with the cold malice that lies at his core.
ALEX JIMENEZ (17)
Part of the church youth group and daughter of the lead elder, Ed. As her mother is dying in the hospital, her mourning causes her to reject everyone, including the support of her father and the church which she deems sanctimonious. The only person she lets in is Youth Pastor Nathan, who provides a means of escape and a sense of acceptance and love which is proven to be false as he is exposed as the biggest hypocrite of them all.
LUKE SCHULAR (14)
Part of the church youth group, and son of Pastor Tom. A sensitive and lost teen, Luke is dealing with feelings of religious guilt and shame as he wrestles through puberty and witnesses hypocrisy within the church and his family. These struggles lead to an almost erratic personality, as he modulates his persona and beliefs depending on the peer group. When he discovers Nathan and Taylor’s relationship, it drives him further into this state of neurosis and forces him to face the inner conflicts that have been tearing him apart.
SUPPORTING CHARACTERS
THE ELDERS
Led by Taylor’s father Ed, the church’s elders and leadership are made up of men who, although they share a spectrum of views, are beholden to maintaining the status quo and established hierarchy in the church. Greg, one of the Elders, particularly represents the complexity of the situation at hand. As a young man, he was mentored by Tom to repent and deny his homosexual urges and now as a married man with a child he is determined to destroy what he sees as Tom’s new hypocritical liberal leanings.
THE WOMEN
Although the church is filled with women committed to maintaining the status quo and ousting Tom for his pro LGBTQ+ stance, there are also many who are ready and actively pushing for change. This includes Tom’s wife, Jamie, who has been ahead of her husband from day one, and Kim, a Ph.D. student married to Nathan, becoming suspicious of her smooth-talking husband.
THE YOUTH
Although Luke and Taylor are part of this group, the confusion they face extends to most of the youth who attend the church. As they struggle to make sense of their growing urges, they all have to deal with the spectre of hell for giving into them. Some take shelter and find comfort in evangelical fundamentalism, while others rebel against it. Jacob, a kid from a broken home who lives near the church, uses it as a place of escape and finds comfort there but even he is not completely safe from the hypocrisy that permeates the community.
THE CHURCH
With the majority of the film taking place within a church, the building becomes a character in and of itself. Constructed in the ’90s, it has only seen a few updates but maintains most of it’s dated aesthetic. With a sanctuary that holds 200, a lobby lined with coat racks, pastoral office space, and a basement for Sunday school, youth events, and potluck lunches, it has just enough nooks and to hide its dark secrets.
FilmMaker
ERIC PAULS
Eric Pauls is a writer, director, based in Calgary AB, Canada. His films are often observational character studies that explore existential themes. He began his film career creating both narrative and documentary shorts, then wrote and directed his debut feature film To the Mountain (tothemountainthefilm.com). That film debuted at the 2017 Oakville Film and Art Festival, had a successful theatrical run, has been sold all over the world, including HBO Europe and was named a Standout Discovery by Itunes. More recently he has direct the documentary Rosebud, Alberta (ericpauls.com/rosebuddoc), which premiered at the 2019 Edmonton International Film Festival and has been shortlisted for the 2019 Sundance Writers Lab, the Bluecat Screenplay comp, and the Austin Film Festival for his script Lament (more info at ericpauls.com).
