Arts AT The Detroit Jewish News ,ment THE MO 1ES O 8 0 O a 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.