An Evening of Angelus at Notre Dame

On Saturday, May 1st, we welcomed back the wonderful people of Angelus and four of their immensely talented, award-winning filmmakers to a near-capacity audience in the Browning Cinema for our 4th annual Evening of Angelus at Notre Dame.

Each year, Fr. Willy Raymond, C.S.C., director of Family Theater Productions (FTP) in Hollywood, and the director of the Angelus Awards, Monika Moreno, travel the globe with a group of Angelus Awards winners in order to showcase the work of these young artists and to promote the transformation of culture through the mass media. In 2009, the Angelus Awards hit the road for stops at the Sundance Film Festival and Rome, Italy, and continues to make an impact at film events worldwide. One of their final stops on this grand tour has come to be Notre Dame, where the filmmakers come in contact with the Holy Cross ties between FTP and Our Lady’s University. Here, they share their work with a delighted crowd of ND students, faculty, and staff along with others from the South Bend community.

This year's event included the screening of four award-winning short films: Topi, an animated film about the division of India into India and Pakistan in the 1940s (written and directed by Arjun Rihan); Patrol, in which a divorced father working as a security guard for a parking garage does everything he can to impress his estranged 6-year old son (written and directed by John Patton Ford); Joburg, a gritty, realistic vision of modern-day Johannesburg and the lives of two very different inhabitants of the city (written and directed by Thabo Wolfaardt), and Magellan, a coming-of-age tale about young love in modern-day Atlanta (written and directed by Sebastian Davis). All four of the aspiring young filmmakers made it to the event and were able to watch the screening of each of their films. After the screening, Monika Moreno moderated a question-and-answer session between the filmmakers and the audience. The audience was large and very enthusiastic and responsive to the films, and a reception was held in the filmmakers' honor outside of the Browning Cinema.

Given the connections between the University, FTP’s founder Fr. Patrick Peyton, C.S.C., and the Congregation of Holy Cross, it is entirely fitting that An Evening of Angelus at Notre Dame continues to develop into an exciting Notre Dame tradition. A beautiful day that traditionally begins with a Mass said by Fr. Willy in Notre Dame’s Log Chapel continues with a lunch in The Morris Inn that affords a chance for Notre Dame students to meet the Angelus filmmakers and culminates with the screening and panel in the Browning Cinema. An Evening of Angelus at Notre Dame is an exciting event that helps fulfill the Center’s mission to help transform all of culture with the light of the Catholic moral and intellectual tradition.