A pastor in a secretive and extreme Pentecostal church has advocated corporal punishment of children as a way to prevent school shootings and gender dysphoria. The leaked recording of the pastor advocating a “rod of correction” policy emerged as Victoria’s child safety watchdog expressed concern about practices at the Geelong Revival Centre. Liana Buchanan, Victoria’s Commissioner for Children and Young People. Credit: Justin McManus Liana Buchanan, principal commissioner for children and young people, said the experiences and allegations recently revealed by former Geelong Revival Centre members were “extremely concerning”, and described some “unacceptable institutional responses”. “Children deserve to be safe and protected by the organisations they participate in,” Buchanan said. “Our recently tabled annual report notes that some religious organisations continue to struggle with identifying and managing risks to children. That risk is certainly amplified where there is a culture of silence and adults and children are afraid to speak out. “We know that ‘closed institutions’ carry more risks of child abuse than other types of institutions. These institutions need to be aware of these heightened risks and have legal responsibilities to take action to keep children safe, prevent child abuse and respond to allegations of child abuse.” The latest annual report from the Commission for Young People and Children, tabled in state parliament last month, included data indicating a higher proportion of sexual offence allegations in religious bodies than any other sector. Buchanan encouraged people with experience or knowledge of abuse within the centre’s network of churches to contact her agency, which has statutory powers to investigate breaches of child safety laws. After decades of operating with minimal external scrutiny, the GRC and its affiliate churches across Australia are examined in a new investigative podcast, LiSTNR’s Secrets We Keep: Pray Harder , and reports by this masthead. This masthead has obtained a recording of a sermon given by a Tasmanian pastor of a GRC-affiliated church in which members are warned that society did not understand the need to physically punish children to ensure obedience. “As far as the world is concerned, well. They would be very critical of us for preaching and teaching these things,” Tasmanian pastor Neil Griggs says in the recording. “Let’s not go over the top about this word ‘beating’. It just means to smack. It doesn’t mean to be brutal. ‘Thou shalt beat him with the rod or smack him and shalt deliver his soul from hell.’ Well, isn’t that worth doing? Deliver his soul from hell. “If we don’t teach children obedience, it won’t be well with them ... if we don’t correct them and chasten them, and reprove them, and rebuke them when they need it, it will not be well with them.” The leaked sermon from Griggs provides an example of how the church leadership persuades adult members that children without discipline could face disastrous outcomes later in life. “And here we are now, the children. The scourge of social media has twisted them all up. Unrestrained. Unchecked. Spoilt ... everything that their heart could desire had wealth lavished upon them, and they’re not happy,” he said. “And they grow up, and they go and get a gun, and they go into a school and they shoot people. And they’re all upset. No, we’re telling them. Well, you’ve got some problems. Not because you weren’t smacked as a child. Is everybody else’s fault? Maybe. Maybe think about it. Maybe you should be a girl instead of a boy or a boy instead of a girl.” As part of the investigation, former members have revealed alleged cover-ups of child sexual abuse, the violent physical punishment of children, pressure on church members to forgo medical treatment, homophobic and racist teachings and harsh restrictions placed on the freedoms of women and girls. There is no suggestion Neil Griggs has been responsible for any abuse or for failing to report child safety issues. Griggs did not respond to requests for comment. The GRC leadership has also repeatedly declined to answer questions from this masthead. Dozens more former members have come forward since the release of the podcast to detail harrowing accounts of their alleged sexual, physical and emotional abuse while growing up inside a church that controls almost every aspect of its members’ lives. In August, 38-year-old GRC member Todd Hubers van Assenraad pleaded guilty to 16 child sexual abuse charges involving nine children aged under 16. The Age is not suggesting his victims were from families associated with the church. The use of corporal punishment on children is legal in Victoria. However, the use of excessive force is illegal. As is the exposure of children to emotional harm through constant abuse or use of threats to frighten them. Griggs, in his sermon, encouraged mothers, who the church prefers to stay at home rather than work, to question their children about what they were taught at school each day and to remind them what the Bible says. “Find out what happened at school today when they’re amongst all those unsaved people, or with all those perhaps well-meaning, unsaved teachers, with all their worldly ideas ... parents are the ones who say what’s going to happen and when it’s going to happen.” Despite the pastor’s call for moderate physical punishment, more than a dozen former church members have given accounts of their violent childhood beatings with belts, fists and rods. The Geelong Revival Centre. Credit: Simon Schluter A single mother described a male member of the church repeatedly hitting her autistic toddler son, causing what she claimed were life-changing injuries. The woman has sought legal advice over this incident, which allegedly happened a few years ago. A former pastor at a GRC-linked overseas assembly also detailed his knowledge of deafness in one boy growing up in the church due to repeated blows to his head by his father. Former members also claimed the church’s empowerment of men led to domestic violence within households and situations where children were physically punished by adults who were not their parents or guardians. Former church members said the “cult-like” nature of the GRC and the constant “doomsday” predictions had children constantly in fear about the end of their world and the possibility that they and their families could burn in hell if they had fallen out with their pastor. If you or anyone you know needs help, call Lifeline on 13 11 14 (see lifeline.org.au ), Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636 (see beyondblue.org.au ) or 1800 RESPECT (1800 737 732).
One night last month, near the end of the Chicago International Film Festival, a particularly long line of moviegoers snaked down Southport Avenue by the Music Box Theatre. The hot ticket? This fall’s hottest ticket, in fact, all over the international festival circuit? Well, it’s a 215-minute drama about a fictional Hungarian Jewish architect who emigrates to America in 1947 after surviving the Holocaust. The film’s title, “The Brutalist,” references several things, firstly a post-World War II design imperative made of stern concrete, steel, and a collision of poetry and functionality. Director and co-writer Brady Corbet, who wrote “The Brutalist” with his filmmaker wife, Mona Fastvold, explores brutalism in other forms as well, including love, envy, capitalist economics and how the promise of America eludes someone like the visionary architect László Tóth, played by Adrien Brody. Corbet, now 36 and a good bet for Oscar nominations this coming January, says his unfashionable sprawl of a picture, being distributed by A24, is also about the “strange relationship between artist and patron, and art and commerce.” It co-stars Felicity Jones as the visionary architect’s wife, Erzsébet, trapped in Eastern Europe after the war with their niece for an agonizingly long time. Guy Pearce portrays the imperious Philadelphia blueblood who hires Tóth, a near-invisible figure in his adopted country, to design a monumental public building known as the Institute in rural Pennsylvania. The project becomes an obsession, then a breaking point and then something else. Corbet’s project, which took the better part of a decade to come together after falling apart more than once, felt like that, too. Spanning five decades and filmed in Hungary and Italy, “The Brutalist” looks like a well-spent $50 million project. In actuality, it was made for a mere $10 million, with Corbet and cinematographer Lol Crawley shooting on film, largely in the VistaVision process. The filmmaker said at the Chicago festival screening: “Who woulda thunk that for screening after screening over the last couple of months, people stood in line around the block to get into a three-and-a-half-hour movie about a mid-century designer?” He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with Fastvold and their daughter. Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length. Q: Putting together an independent movie, keeping it on track, getting it made: not easy, as you told the Music Box audience last night. Money is inevitably going to be part of the story of “The Brutalist,” since you had only so much to make a far-flung historical epic. A: Yeah, that’s right. In relation to my earlier features, “The Childhood of a Leader” had a $3 million budget. The budget for “Vox Lux” was right around $10 million, same as “The Brutalist,” although the actual production budget for “Vox Lux” was about $4.5 million. Which is to say: All the money on top of that was going to all the wrong places. For a lot of reasons, when my wife and I finished the screenplay for “The Brutalist,” we ruled out scouting locations in Philadelphia or anywhere in the northeastern United States. We needed to (film) somewhere with a lot less red tape. My wife’s previous film, “The World to Come,” she made in Romania; we shot “Childhood of a Leader” in Hungary. For “The Brutalist” we initially landed on Poland, but this was early on in COVID and Poland shut its borders the week our crew was arriving for pre-production. When we finally got things up and running again with a different iteration of the cast (the original ensemble was to star Joel Edgerton, Marion Cotillard and Mark Rylance), after nine months, the movie fell apart again because Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. We couldn’t get any of the banks to cash-flow the tax credit (for location shooting in Poland). It’s completely stable now, but at that time the banks were nervous about whether the war would be contained to Ukraine or not. And then we finally got it up and running in Budapest, Hungary. Q: That’s a long time. A: Every filmmaker I know suffers from some form of post-traumatic stress (laughs). It sounds funny but it’s true. At every level. On the level of independent cinema, you’re just so damn poor. You’re not making any money, and yet from nose to tail, at minimum, a movie always takes a couple of years. With bigger projects, you might have a little more personal security but a lot less creative security with so many more cooks in the kitchen. Either route you choose, it can be an arduous and painful one. Whether you’re making a movie for a million dollars, or $10 million, or $100 million, it’s still “millions of dollars.” And if you’re concerned about the lives and livelihoods of the people working with you, it’s especially stressful. People are constantly calling you: “Is it happening? Are we starting? Should I take this other job or not?” And you have 250 people who need that answer from you. Every iteration of the project, I always thought we were really about to start in a week, two weeks. It’s just very challenging interpersonally. It’s an imposition for everyone in your life. And then there’s the imposition of screening a movie that’s three-and-a-half-hours long for film festivals, where it’s difficult to find that kind of real estate on the schedule. So essentially, making a movie means constantly apologizing. Q: At what point in your acting career did you take a strong interest in what was going on behind the camera? A: I was making short films when I was 11, 12 years old. The first thing I ever made more properly, I guess, was a short film I made when I was 18, “Protect You + Me,” shot by (cinematographer) Darius Khondji. It was supposed to be part of a triptych of films, and I went to Paris for the two films that followed it. And then all the financing fell through. But that first one screened at the London film festival, and won a prize at Sundance, and I was making music videos and other stuff by then. Q: You’ve written a lot of screenplays with your wife. How many? A: Probably 25. We work a lot for other people, too. I think we’ve done six together for our own projects. Sometimes I’ll start something at night and my wife will finish in the morning. Sometimes we work very closely together, talking and typing together. It’s always different. Right now I’m writing a lot on the road, and my wife is editing her film, which is a musical we wrote, “Ann Lee,” about the founder of the Shakers. I’m working on my next movie now, which spans a lot of time, like “The Brutalist,” with a lot of locations. And I need to make sure we can do it for not a lot of money, because it’s just not possible to have a lot of money and total autonomy. For me making a movie is like cooking. If everyone starts coming in and throwing a dash of this or that in the pot, it won’t work out. A continuity of vision is what I look for when I read a novel. Same with watching a film. A lot of stuff out there today, appropriately referred to as “content,” has more in common with a pair of Nikes than it does with narrative cinema. Q: Yeah, I can’t imagine a lot of Hollywood executives who’d sign off on “The Brutalist.” A: Well, even with our terrific producing team, I mean, everyone was up for a three-hour movie but we were sort of pushing it with three-and-a-half (laughs). I figured, worst-case scenario, it opens on a streamer. Not what I had in mind, but people watch stuff that’s eight, 12 hours long all the time. They get a cold, they watch four seasons of “Succession.” (A24 is releasing the film in theaters, gradually.) It was important for all of us to try to capture an entire century’s worth of thinking about design with “The Brutalist.” For me, making something means expressing a feeling I have about our history. I’ve described my films as poetic films about politics, that go to places politics alone cannot reach. It’s one thing to say something like “history repeats itself.” It’s another thing to make people see that, and feel it. I really want viewers to engage with the past, and the trauma of that history can be uncomfortable, or dusty, or dry. But if you can make it something vital, and tangible, the way great professors can do for their students, that’s my definition of success. “The Brutalist” opens in New York and Los Angeles on Dec. 20. The Chicago release is Jan. 10, 2025. Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
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