Children of God: Lost and Found

This documentary is not to different from other ones I've seen dedicated to the subject of a religious group openly denying and fighting allegations of child abuse. A huge difference here though is that it was a common practice of the members of this particular Christian cult to molest children as part of the usual routine. Sickening to say the least, in other religious groups they at least know its wrong enough to try and hide it.

Hearing the stories some of these young people tell about what happened to them will make you want to throw up. The documentary is at times painfully amateur but I think overall it works very much in the movies favor since it is made by and from the perspective of one of the lucky few to escape the grasp of these religious nut cases. The doc. points out a few ways to escape from them; to one day just leave and attempt to live a life of manual labor since you have no formal education, or to kill yourself, or I guess to never leave it in the first place. Shocking to me that at least in the U.S. government no one has done much to stop this, its been happening for the last 30 years.

The doc. is short, a little over an hour, but when you've said and shown as much as they have what else is left, to just keep rubbing the wound hoping the scar will heal? I respect these people very much for being brave enough to speak out against "The family" and their actual family. This cult believes that the world will end in the next year or two, hopefully when it doesn't they will come to their senses, hopefully. I just remembered one of the other escape plans open to these poor victims, and that is not only suicide, but first murder, which we find out about in a part of this movie.

As I was watching this I thought how sick these members of this cult must be, but upon a quick sweep of my memory of other such docs. mostly about the Catholic Church, its not like this group is so much more out there than other groups that hurt and damage children and no one seems to do much of anything about it. A strong little documentary with a healing quality for the film maker I'm sure, as well as a great expose of the sick inner workings of a modern day travesty. 7/10 stars.

Director: Noah Thomson