On the day of their sixteenth birthdays, every Amish child is given free rein to explore all the conveniences and temptations of life in the outside "English" world, during a crucial period in their lives known as Rumspringa. Devil's Playground offers an unflinching look at the effects of this culture shock on such previously guileless Amish teens. Once exposed to modern technologies like cars and cable television-along with rock concerts and keg parties-these teenagers' choice is both simple and profoundly difficult. Do they embrace the constraints of the Amish religion and rejoin the church, or do they turn away from their families and community to live on their own in our "modern" society?
Devil's Playground premiered at Sundance, was distributed by Cinemax and was nominated for three Emmys and an Independent Spirit Award.
NOTE: We never cut a trailer for Devil's Playground, the film was that low-budget and under-promoted. This was made at the very beginning of the filmmaking process, a sizzle reel, that I cringe when I hear described as the "Trailer" because it is not a good reflection of the film at all. SO please don't be put off by this and do watch the full film!
FESTIVALS & AWARDS
* Winner, Best Documentary, AFI DV Fest 2001
* Winner, Grand Prize Best Film, AFI DV Fest 2001
* Winner, Audience Award for Best Film, Sarasota International Film Festival 2002
* Winner, Special Jury Prize for Best Documentary, Karlovy-Vary International Film Festival 2002
* Official Selection, Sundance Film Festival 2002
* Nominee, Emmy Award for Outstanding Direction in a Documentary, News & Documentary Emmy Awards 2003
* Nominee, Emmy Award for Outstanding Editing in a Documentary, News & Documentary Emmy Awards 2003
* Nominee, Emmy Award for Best Documentary, News & Documentary Emmy Awards 2003
* Nominee, Best Documentary, Independent Spirit Awards 2003
DIRECTOR’S NOTES
I first came across the Amish while watching WITNESS in 1985. I was fascinated, but I wasn't sure how much was real. Cut to Oxford, 1991. I was writing about cultural theory when I heard about an exhibition of Amish quilts. I was less interested by the quilts than by all the questions they raised about unique artistic expression and established craft traditions, innovation versus constraint, community as opposed to individuality. There was such creativity in the permutations of ordained patterns, and such appeal in a group of women working on one quilt together. But at what cost? I couldn't believe that the American women who made these quilts still fastened their dresses with pins. A few years later in New York I met Daniel Kern and his stepmother who had been raised Mennonite -the church most closely related to the Amish - and I became fascinated with the Amish coming-of-age known as rumspringa. This fascination meant that as soon as I was introduced to the producers I volunteered to drop out of my life and head to Amish country for as long as it would take to make DEVIL'S PLAYGROUND.
At that point nobody was convinced that the film could actually be made, that we'd get access to any actual Amish people. But I was happy to set everything aside to try. I was fascinated by the decision that these young people faced - "to be or not to be Amish", as Faron put it - and what a radical spin it put on their teen years. I wanted to know how the Amish saw America and how I'd see the Amish. Maybe I related to the kids' predicament because I left England on my own at 22 and I'm still wondering if I belong anywhere, and because I'd had my own version of rumspringa with a period of experimentation that began when I was 16. And I loved hanging out with and filming teenagers, whose hopes and vulnerabilities are so tender and visible, and whose lives change shape so fast.
Daniel Kern was the obvious choice for DP, but it was clear that a film crew wouldn't work in Amish country. So we set out for Pennsylvania as just Lucy and Dan, in my little sister's car, with a handycam-sized DVCam PD100, as low-key and unintimidating as we could be. I don't think this film could have been made before miniDV - or cellphones.
The Amish generally condemn photography for fostering pride and generating "graven images" which the first commandment prohibits. But many people enjoyed being filmed so long as they weren't "posing" for the camera. And "posing" for interviews was tolerated among the Beachy Amish congregations and in some more liberal Old Order church districts. But the goal was real access to teenagers, and that turned out to be a challenge.
During rumspringa Amish young people aren't subject to Amish rules, but Amish parenting "breaks the will" of the child and they've been trained to keep their heads down, humble and invisible, in the middle of the crowd. Amish teenagers are also drastically less articulate than their "english" counterparts. English is their second language, there's no time for introspection, personal opinions are avoided, and analytical reasoning is suppressed. Of the few kids who would talk to us, very few wanted to be filmed, and fewer still could discuss themselves or their religion.
I resigned myself to a long-haul "needle-in-the-haystack" approach. But the Lancaster County settlement was especially closed and wary after a widely publicized drug scandal in 1998, so we continued the search in Indiana, where Daniel's step-mom had some distant Amish relatives. We finally found Velda when Daniel's step-mom's great-uncle's second cousin the bishop's son-in-law's boss was friends with a pastor who suggested we meet a new member of his congregation who had quite a story about rumspringa… Velda.
Each one of those introductions took days of visits and discussions. We had to earn trust every step of the way. Even with the teenagers it was crucial that I knew and respected Christian principles. It helped to refer to parables to explain our work. I spent a lot of time reading the Bible. It wasn't filmmaking, but it was what it took to make this film.
Some 100-hour-weeks we scarcely got the camera out of the trunk. We weren't allowed to film any of the best scenes that we witnessed. It was the least efficient filmmaking imaginable, but it was a real pleasure to spend time with some Amish people. Pretty soon strangers knew our names and invited us for supper or hymn-singing. I am conscious of what a privilege it's been to be received into such a closed group. I have enchanting memories of long farmhouse suppers, milking cows and dodging stinky duck houses, charmed summer evenings chatting out in the field as dusk fell and the stars came out. I knew they were enjoying us if they talked until midnight when they had to get up at four. I couldn't film but I listened and learned and this led to and informed everything that I filmed later.
One night at a hoe-down I spotted Faron. He stood out from the crowd with his Tupac swagger and twang. The next day we met up again, and he was mesmerizing. I didn't immediately catch on that he was high. Other kids were hesitant to describe what they ate for breakfast, whereas Faron not only divvied up drugs on camera but shamelessly skimmed his dealer's cut too. He had an "english" girlfriend and an escalating habit. But his ambition was to follow in his father's footsteps and be a minister. He could explain aspects of the religion that completely stumped everyone else. And he told everyone that he was "joining church" in the fall.
My heart went out to him. He was being torn in two. And he was going to let me film it happen. Then when a loud truck went by during our first interview, he paused and started over like a pro. He was a natural. That night I e-mailed Steven that I had found our star.
But as we grew suspicious that Faron was wearing a wire, everyone else grew suspicious that Daniel and I were the undercover cops, using filming as a cover story to gather evidence. Kids threw stones at us yelling, "I smell bacon". I felt like I'd gone for WITNESS but wound up with RUSH - a movie which ends, in case you haven't seen it, with the narc shot dead through a trailer window. We were followed, pulled over by the cops, and thoroughly spooked. We returned to New York, made a 5-minute showreel, sold the film to Channel 4 and Winstar, and kept shooting.
Another low point came a year later, when Faron crashed his (uninsured) car the day after arriving in Florida. Daniel was in the passenger seat and he had taken the hit, suffering bad whiplash injuries. Faron got talking to the valet parking guys while he waited for Daniel to be treated. And so Faron got a job as a parking valet, and I took over the job of DP, which Daniel vacated to recuperate. The crash was the bloodiest, but every step has been a hurdle. The last three years have felt like an assault course.
What has sustained me is that the experience keeps generating more questions. I still can't make up my mind. Sometimes it occurs to me that being Amish should be illegal. Learning that an emaciated 42-year-old woman I knew was anorexic because it was her only means of birth control and after 8 children she couldn't face any more. Listening to yet another boy describe how desperately he begged his parents to let him go on through high school and how much he loathed his factory job. Meeting a gay man whose Amish teen years had been a living hell of chastising himself and praying to be released from his "affliction", which the Amish consider so sinful that they won't even acknowledge it.
But other times I still fantasize about giving it all up to be an Amish farmwife with sixteen kids. If you ask an Amish person you'll find out that heaven and hell are as real as New York and Los Angeles. One magic hour, sitting on the porch drinking lemonade with an old Amish couple, I was moved to tears by the love and peace and grace of their lives - free from clutter, no question as to how to live, eternity sewn up, surrounded by children and a community guaranteed to lavish love and care until the end of their days. The "english" world was ugly when I returned.
But here's some bad news. Since we wrapped filming Faron got tired of trying to get by in Florida. The valet job didn't make enough in the off-season, and by then he was trying to sell $1500 vacuum cleaners door-to-door on commission which - unsurprisingly - didn't pay. Even Faron, smart as he is, is not equipped to succeed outside the Amish community. He left Emma and moved back to Indiana, succumbing to incessant pressure from his parents and the lure of a lucrative job with his dad. And it wasn't long before his parents turned him in for possession of a loaded gun and drugs paraphernalia. I submitted the film as part of his defense case and he got off lightly, two years jail and five years probation. He's happy because it's in a work-release program, so he'll be leaving jail for eight hours to work on an RV production line. Emma cried because he's happy to be in jail, she's afraid that he's given up hope. I was constantly struggling to balance the urge to help ward off the disasters with the job of standing back to document the disasters. I wish I'd helped him avoid this.
I'm ambivalent about having documented a community that didn't want to be documented. One of the Bible passages often quoted by the Amish is 2 Corinthians 6:14: "Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness…"
Filming the Amish is a painfully unequal yoke and I'm relieved to stop. And I wanted to promote understanding but I didn't want to ensnare people in worldly media when their life's work is to remove themselves from it. But when I think about kids as bright as Faron winding up in jail on such grave charges, all this work is warranted.
Devil's Playground premiered at Sundance, was distributed by Cinemax and was nominated for three Emmys and an Independent Spirit Award.
NOTE: We never cut a trailer for Devil's Playground, the film was that low-budget and under-promoted. This was made at the very beginning of the filmmaking process, a sizzle reel, that I cringe when I hear described as the "Trailer" because it is not a good reflection of the film at all. SO please don't be put off by this and do watch the full film!
FESTIVALS & AWARDS
* Winner, Best Documentary, AFI DV Fest 2001
* Winner, Grand Prize Best Film, AFI DV Fest 2001
* Winner, Audience Award for Best Film, Sarasota International Film Festival 2002
* Winner, Special Jury Prize for Best Documentary, Karlovy-Vary International Film Festival 2002
* Official Selection, Sundance Film Festival 2002
* Nominee, Emmy Award for Outstanding Direction in a Documentary, News & Documentary Emmy Awards 2003
* Nominee, Emmy Award for Outstanding Editing in a Documentary, News & Documentary Emmy Awards 2003
* Nominee, Emmy Award for Best Documentary, News & Documentary Emmy Awards 2003
* Nominee, Best Documentary, Independent Spirit Awards 2003
DIRECTOR’S NOTES
I first came across the Amish while watching WITNESS in 1985. I was fascinated, but I wasn't sure how much was real. Cut to Oxford, 1991. I was writing about cultural theory when I heard about an exhibition of Amish quilts. I was less interested by the quilts than by all the questions they raised about unique artistic expression and established craft traditions, innovation versus constraint, community as opposed to individuality. There was such creativity in the permutations of ordained patterns, and such appeal in a group of women working on one quilt together. But at what cost? I couldn't believe that the American women who made these quilts still fastened their dresses with pins. A few years later in New York I met Daniel Kern and his stepmother who had been raised Mennonite -the church most closely related to the Amish - and I became fascinated with the Amish coming-of-age known as rumspringa. This fascination meant that as soon as I was introduced to the producers I volunteered to drop out of my life and head to Amish country for as long as it would take to make DEVIL'S PLAYGROUND.
At that point nobody was convinced that the film could actually be made, that we'd get access to any actual Amish people. But I was happy to set everything aside to try. I was fascinated by the decision that these young people faced - "to be or not to be Amish", as Faron put it - and what a radical spin it put on their teen years. I wanted to know how the Amish saw America and how I'd see the Amish. Maybe I related to the kids' predicament because I left England on my own at 22 and I'm still wondering if I belong anywhere, and because I'd had my own version of rumspringa with a period of experimentation that began when I was 16. And I loved hanging out with and filming teenagers, whose hopes and vulnerabilities are so tender and visible, and whose lives change shape so fast.
Daniel Kern was the obvious choice for DP, but it was clear that a film crew wouldn't work in Amish country. So we set out for Pennsylvania as just Lucy and Dan, in my little sister's car, with a handycam-sized DVCam PD100, as low-key and unintimidating as we could be. I don't think this film could have been made before miniDV - or cellphones.
The Amish generally condemn photography for fostering pride and generating "graven images" which the first commandment prohibits. But many people enjoyed being filmed so long as they weren't "posing" for the camera. And "posing" for interviews was tolerated among the Beachy Amish congregations and in some more liberal Old Order church districts. But the goal was real access to teenagers, and that turned out to be a challenge.
During rumspringa Amish young people aren't subject to Amish rules, but Amish parenting "breaks the will" of the child and they've been trained to keep their heads down, humble and invisible, in the middle of the crowd. Amish teenagers are also drastically less articulate than their "english" counterparts. English is their second language, there's no time for introspection, personal opinions are avoided, and analytical reasoning is suppressed. Of the few kids who would talk to us, very few wanted to be filmed, and fewer still could discuss themselves or their religion.
I resigned myself to a long-haul "needle-in-the-haystack" approach. But the Lancaster County settlement was especially closed and wary after a widely publicized drug scandal in 1998, so we continued the search in Indiana, where Daniel's step-mom had some distant Amish relatives. We finally found Velda when Daniel's step-mom's great-uncle's second cousin the bishop's son-in-law's boss was friends with a pastor who suggested we meet a new member of his congregation who had quite a story about rumspringa… Velda.
Each one of those introductions took days of visits and discussions. We had to earn trust every step of the way. Even with the teenagers it was crucial that I knew and respected Christian principles. It helped to refer to parables to explain our work. I spent a lot of time reading the Bible. It wasn't filmmaking, but it was what it took to make this film.
Some 100-hour-weeks we scarcely got the camera out of the trunk. We weren't allowed to film any of the best scenes that we witnessed. It was the least efficient filmmaking imaginable, but it was a real pleasure to spend time with some Amish people. Pretty soon strangers knew our names and invited us for supper or hymn-singing. I am conscious of what a privilege it's been to be received into such a closed group. I have enchanting memories of long farmhouse suppers, milking cows and dodging stinky duck houses, charmed summer evenings chatting out in the field as dusk fell and the stars came out. I knew they were enjoying us if they talked until midnight when they had to get up at four. I couldn't film but I listened and learned and this led to and informed everything that I filmed later.
One night at a hoe-down I spotted Faron. He stood out from the crowd with his Tupac swagger and twang. The next day we met up again, and he was mesmerizing. I didn't immediately catch on that he was high. Other kids were hesitant to describe what they ate for breakfast, whereas Faron not only divvied up drugs on camera but shamelessly skimmed his dealer's cut too. He had an "english" girlfriend and an escalating habit. But his ambition was to follow in his father's footsteps and be a minister. He could explain aspects of the religion that completely stumped everyone else. And he told everyone that he was "joining church" in the fall.
My heart went out to him. He was being torn in two. And he was going to let me film it happen. Then when a loud truck went by during our first interview, he paused and started over like a pro. He was a natural. That night I e-mailed Steven that I had found our star.
But as we grew suspicious that Faron was wearing a wire, everyone else grew suspicious that Daniel and I were the undercover cops, using filming as a cover story to gather evidence. Kids threw stones at us yelling, "I smell bacon". I felt like I'd gone for WITNESS but wound up with RUSH - a movie which ends, in case you haven't seen it, with the narc shot dead through a trailer window. We were followed, pulled over by the cops, and thoroughly spooked. We returned to New York, made a 5-minute showreel, sold the film to Channel 4 and Winstar, and kept shooting.
Another low point came a year later, when Faron crashed his (uninsured) car the day after arriving in Florida. Daniel was in the passenger seat and he had taken the hit, suffering bad whiplash injuries. Faron got talking to the valet parking guys while he waited for Daniel to be treated. And so Faron got a job as a parking valet, and I took over the job of DP, which Daniel vacated to recuperate. The crash was the bloodiest, but every step has been a hurdle. The last three years have felt like an assault course.
What has sustained me is that the experience keeps generating more questions. I still can't make up my mind. Sometimes it occurs to me that being Amish should be illegal. Learning that an emaciated 42-year-old woman I knew was anorexic because it was her only means of birth control and after 8 children she couldn't face any more. Listening to yet another boy describe how desperately he begged his parents to let him go on through high school and how much he loathed his factory job. Meeting a gay man whose Amish teen years had been a living hell of chastising himself and praying to be released from his "affliction", which the Amish consider so sinful that they won't even acknowledge it.
But other times I still fantasize about giving it all up to be an Amish farmwife with sixteen kids. If you ask an Amish person you'll find out that heaven and hell are as real as New York and Los Angeles. One magic hour, sitting on the porch drinking lemonade with an old Amish couple, I was moved to tears by the love and peace and grace of their lives - free from clutter, no question as to how to live, eternity sewn up, surrounded by children and a community guaranteed to lavish love and care until the end of their days. The "english" world was ugly when I returned.
But here's some bad news. Since we wrapped filming Faron got tired of trying to get by in Florida. The valet job didn't make enough in the off-season, and by then he was trying to sell $1500 vacuum cleaners door-to-door on commission which - unsurprisingly - didn't pay. Even Faron, smart as he is, is not equipped to succeed outside the Amish community. He left Emma and moved back to Indiana, succumbing to incessant pressure from his parents and the lure of a lucrative job with his dad. And it wasn't long before his parents turned him in for possession of a loaded gun and drugs paraphernalia. I submitted the film as part of his defense case and he got off lightly, two years jail and five years probation. He's happy because it's in a work-release program, so he'll be leaving jail for eight hours to work on an RV production line. Emma cried because he's happy to be in jail, she's afraid that he's given up hope. I was constantly struggling to balance the urge to help ward off the disasters with the job of standing back to document the disasters. I wish I'd helped him avoid this.
I'm ambivalent about having documented a community that didn't want to be documented. One of the Bible passages often quoted by the Amish is 2 Corinthians 6:14: "Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness…"
Filming the Amish is a painfully unequal yoke and I'm relieved to stop. And I wanted to promote understanding but I didn't want to ensnare people in worldly media when their life's work is to remove themselves from it. But when I think about kids as bright as Faron winding up in jail on such grave charges, all this work is warranted.