We are kicking off our month of excitement, leading up to our 2nd International Strasburg Film Festival with announcements regarding our event, which benefits the Shenandoah County Public School District’s Theatre Programs. Today we’re featuring Where There is Darkness. It will be played during our Saturday, 1:30 PM screening at Strasburg Town Hall. We love the website for this film and really enjoyed their story about making this documentary. Below are excerpts and you can read the full story here.
Synopsis
Synopsis
Coming off the heels of their 2016 documentary Apparition Hill, the small team at Stella Mar Films is determined to continue making films that have the potential to change the world.
Cimela was captivated when she first heard about Fr. Rene Robert’s murder on NPR. The tale of mercy amid tragedy sounded like the kind of story that she and her co-filmmakers should investigate deeper, so she immediately called Sean and Jessi.
A native Floridian, Sean had followed the story on the news when it first happened, but this was the first he had heard about Fr. Rene’s Declaration of Life. The more he learned about the story, the more he intrigued he became.
Jessi, on the other hand, was amazed that she hadn’t heard about the story up until that moment. With her love for true crime dramas and detective shows, she needed no convincing.
And so, just like that, Stella Mar Films had a new project!
With St. Augustine located less than two hours from Sean’s home, we convened at the Stella Mar Filmsoffice in Florida and headed north to our first of many shoots for Where There Is Darkness.
Our first trip to St. Augustine opened many doors. We met with and interviewed the local bishop, sheriff, and several of Fr. Rene’s fellow priests—all of whom were fighting to get Fr. Rene’s declaration of life recognized by the courts. Our first shoot left us energized and intrigued.
Then, in April, 2017, we attended and filmed the one year Memorial Mass of Fr. Rene’s passing. The event brought together the diverse St. Augustine community and showed us just a glimpse of the enormous impact that Fr. Rene had on people in the area. We also met Detectives Tolbert and Jimenez who came to pay their respects. Since then we’ve interviewed them sev
eral times, and they put us in touch with Steven Murray’s sisters, Bobbie Jean and Crystal, who have opened up about their family’s dark past.
After our first shoots in St. Augustine, we could not stop thinking about this story. We were together in California at a film festival for our previous movie when we began thinking about Fr. Rene’s Franciscan roots and thus we came up with the title for this film: Where There Is Darkness.
We feel that this title applies to this story in many beautiful ways, especially with how Fr. Rene tried to bring light to those in darkness through his ministry. Our film shows how Fr. Rene is still a light even after his passing. We also felt that the film should show the darkness faced in the Murrays’ upbringings, to juxtapose that with the theme of mercy.
Throughout this year, we’ve made several more trips to film in St. Augustine, and we also journeyed to Georgia and South Carolina to film a monumental court hearing about the case. (Click here to read the rest of the story)
