Catholic filmmaker explores forgiveness through the ‘power of stories’

Defining the purpose of art can be a challenge. The possible interpretations are as seemingly infinite as the creation that the artist participates in, but for Mission  filmmaker David Mora Perea the goal is simple: “it’s about the power of stories.”

Mora Perea first explored stories while pursuing acting at University of the Fraser Valley alongside his studies in science and education. During his studies he appeared in Accidental, a short film that won the Best Student Film Award at the Oxford Film Festival in 2018.

While working on set, he found himself drawn away from acting and toward the nitty gritty behind-the-scenes details of filmmaking.

After graduating, Mora Perea founded a small production company called Leitmotif Pictures, with friends Joshua Vanderlinden and Malibu Taetz.

A leitmotif, they explain on their website, “is a recurring musical theme that represents a character, place, or idea. Leitmotifs exist in endless varieties, but they all come together to create something beautiful in a larger piece of music. In the same way, the films we create at Leitmotif Pictures may be of all genres and styles, but together they form a greater picture that upholds the beautiful in life.” 

Running a production company allows the filmmakers freedom to pursue stories they choose in ways that feel authentic to their own artistic vision.

Mora Perea directed his first short film, The Rise, in 2019. It won several awards, including a bronze placement for Best Cinematography and Best New Director at the Los Angeles-based Independent Shorts Awards.

Rooted in Christ’s command to forgive 70 times seven times, The Rise offers a meditation on the freeing nature of forgiveness and the impact that our limited perspectives can have on the trajectory of our lives.

Though many people may not be familiar with short films, Mora Perea thinks they offer a powerful vehicle with which to tell stories that have “something powerful to say.”

The brevity of the short film mixes with his long-time interest in science fiction and short stories, to which Mora Perea attributes an early love of American author and screenwriter Ray Bradbury.

“I would love to make The Veldt as a short film,” Mora Perea said about one of Bradbury’s best known short stories. Even though The Rise centres on relationships and dialogue there is a recurring narrative loop that smuggles in this science fiction influence.

Despite accepting a 2019 bronze award for Best New Director, Mora Perea emphasizes that filmmaking is a group effort.

“As much as the director has a lot of power, it’s a lot of very talented people coming together. For me it was always about bringing [together people who] I like to call collaborators. I have a vision that I want, but I don’t have the skills or the knowledge to make it happen,” he told The B.C. Catholic.

One of these collaborators was co-writer Alec Gloanec, a high school friend who teaches at St. John Brebeuf Regional Secondary in Abbotsford. Gloanec made the initial pitch and worked with Mora Perea to refine the story for film. The script became a labour of love and they pored over it for about a year, even making significant changes a few weeks before filming.

“We discussed possible story lines, and we ended on one about forgiveness, because our culture doesn’t really understand forgiveness very well,” Gloanec said.

“In a popular culture that speaks a lot about tolerance, we aren’t very tolerant in my estimation, and we don’t really know what forgiveness is, so we decided to tell a story that would provoke thought around that topic.”

Mora Perea wryly refuses to define “Catholic art,” but he does like to emphasize the relationship between his faith and his work: “I may make a film that is not implicitly about faith, but as long as it in some ways honours God, it is part of living my faith.”

In The Rise, this is most clear in the moral vision of the story, which revolves around forgiveness and how deceit leads to pain. It can also be found in his next project, Solitude, which he hopes will make the elderly more visible in a world that often forgets them in homes and relegates them to the sidelines.

While Solitude is still in the writing and storyboarding phase, Mora Perea’s plan is to tell the story of an old man, forgotten by the world and lost in his age. The film’s perspective will shift between the man’s experiences in the city where he lives, and a forest that represents his loneliness.

As time passes, Mora Perea wants the two to mix in a way that will show “there is really no one [world] that is more true than the other, that solitude is just as real as everything else that we see ... If I can get one person to call their grandparents after watching the film, then that’s good.”

Leitmotif Pictures has produced a number of short films that illustrate the artistic worth of the Christian imagination and the power of telling stories.

For more information or to view their short films, visit leitmotifpictures.com.