Review of Son of Man: An African Jesus Film, edited by Richard Walsh, Jeffrey L. Staley and Adele Reinhartz

This collection of academic essays by international religion and Africa scholars focuses upon the Xhosa (and fleeting English and Latin) language film, Son of Man (2006), an award-winning production by British-born, South African theatre and film director, Mark Dornford-May. This book is the latest in an ever-growing list of production histories and academic analyses of religion-themed films. It sits comfortably alongside Hollywood Holyland: The Filming and Scoring of The Greatest Story Ever Told (Darby 1992), Jean-Luc Godard’s Hail Mary: Women and the Sacred in Film (Locke and Warren 1993), Written in Stone: Making Cecil B. DeMille’s Epic, The Ten Commandments (Orrison 1999), Life Is Beautiful, but Not for Jews – Another View of the Film by Benigni (Niv 2003), The Matrix Revealed: The Theology of the Matrix Trilogy (Worthing 2004), The Da Vinci Code Adventure: On the Trail of Fact, Legend, Faith, & Film (Gunn, Wright, and Wright 2006), Conversations with God: The Making of the Movie (Joynes and Walsch 2006), Mel Gibson’s
Bible: Religion, Popular Culture, and The Passion of the Christ (Beal and Linafelt 2006), The Gospel According to Star Wars: Faith, Hope, and the Force (McDowell 2007), Light Up the Darkness: Christianity, Calvinism, and Coherence in the Film I Am Legend (Hubner 2008), The Night of the Hunter: A Biography of a Film (Couchman 2009), God on the Streets of Gotham: What the Big Screen Batman Can Teach Us about God and Ourselves (Asay 2012) and their various peers.