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For something that seems to play such a prominent role in society, spirituality doesn’t often get the serious and honest exploration it does in Raw Faith. The documentary, which premieres May 20 at 8pm on Documentary Channel, follows two years in the life of Portland minister Marilyn Sewell, who devotes almost all her time and energy to helping the members of her unitarian congregation, to whom she is beloved. She does so to the detriment of her personal life, causing her grown sons to proclaim their bitterness toward the church for stealing their mother away from them. After 17 years, [...]...

Title: Raw Faith Director: Peter Wiedensmith Featuring: Marilyn Sewell Religious faith is often difficult to discuss openly, let alone capture and sensitively address in something like film, owing not only to the diversity of religious affiliations and denominations, but to the problems many people have with what they view as either hypocrisy or cloying piety when it comes to how people of faith interact with those of opposite beliefs, or no particular religious convictions at all. Raw Faith, a stirring new documentary from director Peter Wiedensmith, is as holistic a portrait of religious devotion and engagement as exists in recent memory, and an achingly, profoundly moving snapshot of how the human experience is...

Alive Mind Cinema is proud to announce the theatrical release of Raw Faith (2010), now set to open on June 24, 2011, at The Quad Cinema in New York City. The film, directed by Peter Wiedensmith, was an official selection at the Nashville Film Festival, where it received the 2010 Npt Human Spirit Award.

After the New York opening, Raw Faith will expand to other national markets during the summer and fall of 2011, before a DVD and VOD release in early 2012.

This surprisingly intimate and revealing documentary follows two years in the private life of Marilyn Sewell, an outspoken and socially progressive Unitarian minister who has re-energized her Portland community.

During Marilyn Sewell’s tenure as senior minister of the First Unitarian Church of Portland, the church grew from 625 to 1,600 members, becoming one of the largest and most esteemed Uu groups in the nation. As one of the few women to lead a large...