Tuesday, March 16, 2004
Blogger Idol Week 9 - Letter to a Celebrity
This weeks topic is "Letter to a Celebrity"
To Ciaran McMeamin, Kiefer Sutherland and Robert Carlyle
I watched your movie tonight - the one David Cunningham directed. That's right "To End All Wars".
It was a powerfully moving story of how love and forgiveness can overcome hatred, revenge and "bloody justice".
I was struck by how the message which was enshrouded by inconceivable conditions on that railway slave gang, while so obvious to the viewer, was yet so foreign to those individuals bound by honour and false morality to not buckle from their positions of hatred. I am reminded that as apparent as the story of forgiveness seems to me, to others it is foreign. This is why some people reject God outright, and others receive Him openly. (For me the most moving part of the Passion of the Christ was the flashback to the mount of olives where He gave the Sermon on the Mount to love your enemies; this flashback occurring cinematically while Jesus was being crucified.)
Thanks for making such a powerful film David Cunningham. I knew someone who was there. He died a few years ago now, but Jock Neeson was a man who found God on that railway and while he never talked about the horrors of the jungle and those POW camps, he would often talk freely in his Scottish accent about how God had found him and rescued him.
Thanks for reminding me of the reality of racial hatred, and how the solution is so simple yet so foreign to so many people. We are all humans, no matter what our racial origin. As I held and looked at my 5 week old daughter tonight while she was sleeping in my arms, I knew that your film told us to be like her in innocence of other races apparent differences and freely celebrate the brotherhood of all mankind.
So Gidday from Down Under (or on top depending which side you are on!) and thaks for a brilliant film - I give it 5/5.
A Must See.
