Bible Camp
2024 · 13m · USA
Directed by Philip DeRise
Genres: coming-of-age, drama
Two young Korean immigrants are dropped at a backwater Bible camp in the Hudson Valley, where they navigate baseball, burnt hot dogs, and casual racism from local kids — until an unsettling afternoon ritual forges unexpected alliances. Based on a true Korean immigrant story.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects a story about racism at Bible camp to be either heavy-handed indictment or earnest reconciliation—Bible Camp does neither, instead pivoting on a record-smashing scene that's so surreal and communal it becomes almost ecstatic, which is genuinely unsettling in a way that makes you uncomfortable for reasons you can't quite name.
DeRise situates this within a lineage of immigrant coming-of-age films and American pastoral subversions, but the formal restraint—the way he lets the vinyl destruction ritual unfold without editorializing—demonstrates a curatorial confidence that trusts the viewer to feel the ideological violence without being told.
The entire film hinges on one decision: making the record-smashing a collective, almost joyful act rather than a punitive one, which reframes what could've been a simple persecution narrative into something about how young outsiders find belonging through participation in ritual—that inversion is the whole film, and it works because of how precisely it's staged.
Festivals
- Micheaux Film Festival 2024
- Indigo Moon Film Festival 2024