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Don't miss
our annual pull-out-
and-save guide to gift
giving over the holidays
featuring:
G IrD E*06
Oliver O'Grady
in a public park
in Ireland
GIFT GUIDE I
Issue Date:
November 23
Ad Deadline:
November 1
Fact Finder
Jewish filmmaker exposes church
cover-up of pedophile priest.
GIFT GUIDE II
Issue Date:
December 7
Ad Deadline:
November 15
Michael Fox
Special to the Jewish News
A
For further details call:
(248) 354.6060
The JEW Family of P %Jucf , s
70 October 26 • 2006
iN
s a journalist for CBS and
CNN, Amy Berg prodUced
numerous segments on
pedophilia charges against California
priests — and the failure of the Los
Angeles archdiocese to come clean
about what Cardinal Roger Mahony
knew, and when.
In her debut documentary, Deliver
Us from Evil, Berg focuses on Oliver
O'Grady, a former
Northern California
priest who did seven
years in prison for just
a few of his crimes. The
film won the nonfiction
prize at the 2006 Los
Angeles Film Festival
in July and presents, for
perhaps the first time,
Amy Berg
a convicted pedophile
speaking graphically
about his actions on camera.
The Los Angeles filmniaker handles
this sensationalist material with
remarkable restraint, yet it seems
inevitable that some critics of the film
will zero in on her Jewishness.
"I'm sure that will come up at a
certain point," Berg says. "I haven't
heard it, but it might already be on the
Internet. My response to that is, thank
God I'm not a Roman Catholic making
this film, because I came to it from a
totally nondenominational point of
view. I came in as a journalist trying to
tell a story, and it wasn't cluttered with
Catholic guilt — or Jewish guilt, or any
of those kinds of guilt that we bring in
to a story that's very personal to us. I
came in; I asked questions; I allowed
the people in my film to tell this story. I
just assembled it."
Still, the filming was brutal. Berg
told the Jewish Journal of Greater
Los Angeles that to keep herself calm
during the process, she turned at the
end of each day to meditation, includ-
ing exercises from Melinda Ribner's
Everyday Kabbalah: A Practical
Guide to Jewish Meditation,
Healing and Personal Growth. After
a week of listening to O'Grady describe
his molestations of children, she told
the Journal, "I was completely over-
whelmed and exhauster
Berg, 36, grew up in the Hollywood
Hills, was raised
Reform, became a bat
mitzvah and was con-
firmed. And, yes, she
went to Catholic school.
"It was the private
school we could afford,
basically:' she says,
laughing. "That's where
all the Jews went, to
the private school they
could afford."
Berg's parents had an abiding inter-
est in current events. "There's never
been a Sunday where they missed 60
Minutes, if they were at home,' she
says. She was influenced not only by
that exposure but also by an ideal of
social responsibility that was instilled
at home.
"My parents are both very up on the
news and really interested in problems
in Israel, problems in the world, and
I've always had that kind of humanitar-
ian affect',' Berg confides. "That's totally
what drew me to journalism — change
and injustice in the world." 1 I
Deliver Us from Evil is sched-
uled to open Friday, Oct. 27, at
the Landmark Main Art Theatre
in Royal Oak.