a) I would like to put up a link to the Jesus film dating back to 1979. Director John Heyman tried to create a movie
as faithful as possible to the Bible, mainly to the Gospel of Luke. You can see the film
(dubbed into Czech) or in the English original
on Youtube with English subtitles -- the English and Czech versions differ
in the first and last three minutes only where the movie is given special introduction for Czech / English audience (+ a few comments)
otherwise the films are identical. The movie was offered to the people in Czechia around 2000 and anyone who ordered the DVD
received a free copy.
The online reviews are not always positive but bombastic effects were not in focus for the creators of the film, they simply tried to
faithfully set forth the message of the Gospel of Luke, with exactly the same words recorded in the Bible,
with no (or just a minimum of) scenes added to it. For this reason the overall impression may be a bit static -- however, this does
not diminish the uniqueness of the film by any means. The makers just tried to visually get across the biblical message.
b) In 2007 the film was followed by an interesting project -- a second film was created, called (Youtube English version)
Magdalena - released from shame. The film half of the time uses scenes from the 1979 movie
and completes the story by adding new sequences of the events as viewed by four different women. The film remains faithful to its emphasis on the unembellished biblical message
and adds episodes from the other three biblical gospel records (i.e. the gospels of Matthew, Mark, John). In 2011 the DVD version called
Magdalena - through her eyes was released. The movie can be bought
with Czech subtitles in Czechia at the cost of 90 Czech crowns.
The English page of the project offers seeing the MAGDALENA movie online in English, French, Russian,
Mandarin Chinese, German, South American Spanish and Turkish.
