The Shepherd – The Must-See Christmas Movie of the Year (and it’s less than 30 minutes!)

I love Christmas movies.

On the Friday after Thanksgiving, I start pulling them out, and I watch the gamut with my kids. We always start with Home Alone, and then Elf, and then everything else from Arthur Christmas to The Santa Clause.  Yes, we even watch and enjoy Home Alone 3 (although it stops there… Home Alone 4 and 5 are dead to me).

The movies we watch celebrate the Christmas season by telling stories about presents, Santa, magic, trains to the North Pole, Red Ryder BB guns, and ghosts of various time periods. None of them (with the exception of Charlie Brown) even consider the importance of the birth of Jesus or the idea that Christmas has any holy or sacred aspect at all. Thinking about this even led me to argue that Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar is more of a Christmas movie than most Christmas movies a couple of years ago.

But this year, I happened upon a gem of a little movie: a Christmas movie about the birth of Jesus that is powerful, fresh, well-made, and worth every moment of your time to watch.

The film – less than thirty minutes in length – is called The Shepherd, and it was made by Dallas Jenkins (The Resurrection of Gavin Stone). This is apparently the pilot of The Chosen, a series Jenkins is hoping to make about the witnesses of Jesus’ life, and if the quality of The Shepherd is any indication, we need to make sure The Chosen gets made. Watch the end of the video for a pitch from Jenkins about how you can be involved in this endeavor.

The Shepherd tells the story of the birth of Jesus from the point of view of one of the shepherds, and while the “eye-witness” conceit may not be original in and of itself, in this case the execution is. The Shepherd succeeds where so many faith-based and Bible films fail – showing and not telling, using the visuals and music to sell the story (and yes, even the message), and making an otherwise oft-told story seem fresh and real.

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know that I don’t give Christian-made films an easy pass, and that if I gush about something, it’s truly gushable. In this case, The Shepherd is absolutely gushable, and if you watch it, it’s liable to become mandatory yuletide viewing in your home as well.

Here’s the film:

So, here’s the link to find out more about The Chosen. Check it out, and you’ll see what I mean. Then come back here to the comment section and let me know what you thought, and then we can argue about Interstellar.

Heck, you can even give me your arguments for Die Hard as the ultimate Christmas movie. I’ll disagree with you, but you can make your arguments.

Advertisement