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00:00 I now have an incredible film for you from National Geographic Documentary Films.
00:07 It is "The Mission," directed by Amanda McBain and Jesse Moss.
00:11 And Amanda and Jesse, join us now.
00:13 Thank you for being with us.
00:14 Hey, Matt.
00:15 Great to see you.
00:17 Wow, what a story this film tells.
00:20 It is about a young Christian missionary, John Chow, who took it upon himself to go
00:26 to the North Sentinel Islands, this is in the Andaman Sea, very, very remote, where
00:32 there's an indigenous group living and he wanted to convert them to Christianity.
00:37 This is a group that has repelled past efforts to be contacted with arrows.
00:44 And sadly, John lost his life in this ill-fated effort.
00:49 But before we get into some questions, let's take a look at a clip from the film.
00:55 And this is John in his own words, talking about how he viewed his mission.
01:01 His words are read by an actor.
01:04 Let's roll that clip now.
01:17 I plan on arriving on the shores of an island in which an unknown number of people live
01:23 who have unknown religious beliefs and speak an unknown tongue.
01:30 Some have called this the most difficult and impossible place to reach on earth.
01:36 Lord, is this island Satan's last stronghold?
01:46 Soli Deo Gloria, John Chow.
02:00 My friend John paid some pirates to go to an island to talk to people about Jesus when
02:07 he knew that he had no business doing that.
02:10 That's John's friend, Levi Davis, there, who's a fellow evangelical, really provides a lot
02:16 of insight in the film into what John was thinking.
02:21 For Amanda and Jesse, it seems in some respects like John was motivated perhaps equally by
02:28 both his evangelical faith and interpretation of the Bible and scripture, but also by adventure
02:34 stories.
02:35 That's right, Matt.
02:36 That was one of the discoveries of this journey for us in understanding John Chow was not
02:44 only realizing that he was possessed of this unshakable evangelical faith, fervor you could
02:50 call it, but that he had consumed secular stories of exploration and adventure.
02:56 He had read National Geographic magazine, Robinson Crusoe, Tintin, comic books that
03:01 we consumed as young people, too.
03:04 Really John was possessed of two faiths.
03:06 I think charting both of those faiths in our story, we discovered that the film was a reflection
03:12 of our own history, too, that John was not totally different from us.
03:18 I think that was not something we anticipated when we started.
03:22 We also hear from John's father through something that he wrote.
03:30 We find out that John's father, they really had a bit of a schism over this, that John's
03:36 father also very much a Christian and yet did not support what his son was trying to
03:43 do.
03:45 His father wrote a very powerful letter, I think in part to process what had happened
03:53 with his son for himself.
03:55 In reading it, both Jesse and I, as parents, I think it was a point of connection for us
04:00 in understanding what it's like to lose your son to what his father calls a whirlpool of
04:10 radical faith.
04:13 It's very moving and very powerful and also very sad, but helped us understand, I think,
04:20 there is a conversation within the faith community about what John had done as well.
04:25 We're secular people and for us, we have a certain judgment about John's actions, but
04:31 even within the faith community, there's debate.
04:33 That was interesting, too.
04:38 He went there by himself.
04:40 However, he had a lot of assistance or counsel, perhaps we could say, in terms of putting
04:47 his mission together.
04:50 It wasn't exactly a solo thing.
04:52 He really enlisted a lot of people and they were behind him.
04:58 I'm sure some of them, we hear a little bit of that from Levi, were like, "Wait a minute,
05:02 this doesn't sound like a great idea," but other people seem to have encouraged him.
05:07 In initial news reporting, John was cast as a kind of reckless zealot on a suicide mission,
05:14 but in fact, he was, as he described himself, the arrow on a spear shaft.
05:22 There was behind him a whole mechanism of institutions and individuals who supported
05:27 his radical mission.
05:30 I think understanding that he wasn't acting alone in a way.
05:34 He had friends who had journeyed with him to the end of an island to set him off on
05:38 his final voyage.
05:39 He attended Oral Roberts University and discovered missions work there, quite initially safe
05:47 missions work, but it became, I think, his hunger for that adventure to test himself,
05:52 put him on this more dangerous course.
05:54 Actually, there was a missions organization that said they would support him.
06:00 I think that John was, in some ways, representative of a larger movement.
06:03 That's part of what we wanted to explore in the film.
06:07 Amanda, can you talk a little bit about North Sentinel Island?
06:11 It's not a place that I had heard of.
06:13 It's very, very remote and is governed, if anyone governs it, by India.
06:21 It also is illegal for any outsiders to go there, but what do we know about the inhabitants
06:26 of North Sentinel Island?
06:28 Part of our draw in making this movie was that question, the awe that a place like North
06:37 Sentinel still exists in 2023, an island that's unmapped, that's unknown, that people have
06:46 been living in isolation for 50,000 years and how magical that is.
06:52 It does make it a challenge to make a story about it.
06:55 In de-meming the headlines, the virality of the story when it was in the news, we knew
07:04 we needed to contextualize their history to the degree that we could.
07:08 That was when we found the historian Adam Goodhart, who himself in the '90s had gone
07:13 on a journey to the island.
07:15 He hadn't actually gotten on the island because, again, of the laws and everything else.
07:22 His understanding of even earlier history of an English viceroy and some of the traumatic
07:28 history actually of this island, which is what we learned, they are not uncontacted,
07:34 in fact.
07:35 They have had moments of very traumatic contact with the outside world.
07:40 That partly explains their position when John was coming to them of not wanting anybody
07:49 to come near them.
07:51 That was important to represent in this film at the same time that we honored the distance
07:57 we needed to keep from it.
08:00 That's an interesting creative challenge.
08:02 John hired or got the services of some fishermen, I guess, to take him to the island.
08:08 They weren't supposed to do that.
08:11 He makes two visits.
08:13 First one, warning shots.
08:16 Second one, fatal.
08:17 Can you talk a little bit about what we know about how he met his end?
08:23 John had prepared quite methodically and intelligently.
08:27 He physically and spiritually hardened himself for this dangerous mission.
08:34 He learned what he could about the Sentinelese, but he didn't speak their language.
08:39 Very little is known about their culture.
08:41 He was really flying blind.
08:44 When he set foot ashore, almost immediately, they put an arrow through his Bible as a warning
08:51 shot and John retreated to the boat that had transported him.
08:56 I think wrestled with the question of whether he would go back.
08:59 We know this because he left a diary, an incredibly wrenching, detailed, anguished document which
09:06 we sourced in trying to understand these final, fatal moments.
09:10 John decided after, I think, searching within himself and having a religious vision, which
09:15 he describes and which we animate in the film, that he would go back and see if the Sentinelese
09:20 would accept him.
09:22 Other missionaries had done similar things and been accepted.
09:25 He reasoned perhaps they would accept him and they didn't.
09:28 Yeah, he's holding up this waterproof Bible.
09:34 Lord only knows what the islanders think.
09:37 In his mind, well, of course, at some level, he's presumably thinking they intuitively
09:43 understand the importance of this object I'm holding in my hand.
09:47 But it means something to him that there's no way it could mean the same thing to them.
09:53 Call it blind faith or call it madness, but he believed that if he quoted Scripture at
09:58 him that they would understand him, perhaps through some universal language that he was
10:03 communicating, the language of love.
10:05 He thought he was bringing them love.
10:08 But it seems unlikely that they did understand the Bible verses that he yelled.
10:15 And so they made it clear they didn't want to receive him.
10:21 And they did fire warning shots, as you say.
10:24 So it wasn't like he got no chance to even say anything at all.
10:31 Amanda, or for Jesse, both of you, what do you think are sort of the key questions raised
10:38 by your film?
10:39 Because boy, it applies not only to North Sentinel Island, but what part of the globe
10:45 has not been colonized?
10:47 Often in the name of Christianity, not always.
10:49 Well, I think there's an important history there that we're reckoning with, the ways
10:54 that missionaries have sought to erase the cultures of indigenous communities around
10:59 the world to impose their views.
11:01 But it's not just missionaries.
11:03 It's others who have gone in the name of Western enlightenment.
11:06 And that's part of the history that we do explore in the film.
11:10 And the very corrupting narratives that we have taken in that define how we think about
11:16 these cultures.
11:17 And so I think there's also an important conversation today about fundamentalism and radical faith.
11:24 And we know the world is gripped by it.
11:26 John was gripped by it.
11:28 How do you become radicalized?
11:30 Are you born radicalized?
11:31 Are you made radical?
11:33 And I think how we understand young men in particular who find that path is, I think,
11:39 an important conversation.
11:40 That is what the mission unravels.
11:43 Yeah.
11:44 I mean, part of that reckoning includes National Geographic, right?
11:49 So that is part of the narrative I took in, that also John took in, also Jesse took in,
11:54 and informed how I grew up to understand what indigenous cultures far, far away were.
12:02 And I think there's some amount of that that we get into in the film.
12:07 I think there's a lot more to do.
12:08 And I think that's a really interesting space.
12:12 Also for me, every time I watch this film, I think there's questions of empathy that
12:17 are really complicated, because John felt what he was doing was the greatest act of
12:26 love that there is.
12:28 And from my point of view, I found it to not be that.
12:34 And so that made me very uncomfortable in investigating this moment, but also really
12:40 interesting to try and really stretch my brain around the idea that this would be an act
12:46 of love when you are not fully considering the point of view of the other side of this
12:52 moment of contact.
12:55 So that's a tricky one, and something that I think we investigate with the older people
13:03 in our films, the people who speak, who themselves have gone similar journeys to John, but are
13:08 now a couple of chapters further on in their lives.
13:11 They're looking back in retrospect at their younger selves, who were aggressively seeking
13:17 adventure or answers or meaning or going out to discover something unknown.
13:22 There's a certain power to that and intrigue to that, and there's also a certain self-centered
13:27 quality to being the hero of that journey.
13:30 And I think that now that they're older, they speak to that in very powerful ways.
13:34 And I'm not sure John ever got to be old enough to have that kind of reflection.
13:40 So that's one of my key takeaways, but I also am open to whatever people take away with
13:47 this film, truly.
13:49 Yeah, that's when you have a layered film, you are going to get different reactions.
13:54 I am curious to the extent you know of what kind of faith communities, how they are taking
14:01 in the film and reacting to it, because to me, it was not an indictment of him.
14:07 It's a very empathetic portrayal of him.
14:10 You mentioned some of the memes that were very cruel memes after he died, but you're
14:15 not about that at all.
14:17 You're really investing him with, you know, it's a tragic story, but you're treating him
14:22 as a human being and his family and, you know, all that they went through with a lot of empathy.
14:29 We've discovered that there is a real hunger in the faith community to engage this conversation
14:34 and to wrestle with these tough questions, to look at John's actions and to consider
14:40 missionary work in the 21st century.
14:43 And so we've been speaking to religious organizations, we've had a lot of people come to us who have
14:49 had complicated relationships with the church growing up, seen the film, are drawn to the
14:54 film.
14:55 So we're excited that the film creates a space for people who, well, if you think John is
14:59 a martyr, you're going to come and be challenged.
15:01 And if you're ready to condemn John and see John as having nothing to do with you, you're
15:05 going to discover a reflection of yourself and perhaps the secular stories of adventure
15:10 that you took in.
15:11 So I think the film has been really, for us, a really valuable conversation framework.
15:17 And I think we know in our culture and our politics today, there's very little that creates
15:21 a space for dialogue across this great gulf that exists.
15:26 And we're not that this is going to create world peace, but I think it does contribute
15:31 to a dialogue that's really healthy and for us, constantly challenging and invigorating
15:38 and important.
15:39 Well, it is a gripping film.
15:42 It's The Mission from National Geographic Documentary Films.
15:45 We've been joined by the directors, Amanda McBain and Jesse Moss.
15:49 Thank you so much for being with us.
15:51 Always a pleasure, Matt.
15:52 Thank you.
15:53 Thank you, Matt.
15:53 - Thank you, Beth.
15:54 [BLANK_AUDIO]