The name is taken from several different references, but the one that most eloquently describes all of us is from the ancient prophet Jeremiah (628 BC). Known as “the broken-hearted prophet,” he intended to stop talking about the things that God was nagging him about; in fact, he swore he was never going to mention God's name again. But then, he says, “this word in my heart is like a fire, a fire shut up in my bones. I am weary of holding it in; indeed, I cannot.”

The three of us most closely linked with Burning Heart have had shipwrecks that have landed us on shores we never anticipated. It has to be a pretty intense, meaningful life to be worth carrying on. We try to tell the stories that burn most brightly and insistently in our hearts. Jeremiah’s words are actually on our business cards.

None of your business.

Right now we’re getting ready to release a feature-length documentary entitled The Fair Trade that is concerned with what a meaningful life looks like and how to find one. Our award-winning short documentary, Laundry and Tosca, is very vibrant with whole events surrounding its primary theme of what it means to follow a soul calling. We’re in preproduction on a dramatic feature entitled Praying the Hours that investigates what kind of life you live after your normal life is fractured by great suffering, loss, or true love.

Praying the Hours uses as a structural element the idea of the Benedictine hours of prayer to tell the stories of eight intertwined people whose lives have reached that place, in one form or another, where they can’t live according to the wristwatch anymore and are forced to enter a new way of being. It’s sort of a complicated thing to explain but will resonate clearly when it’s portrayed visually. To paraphrase Flannery O’Connor, if I could tell you all about it, we wouldn't have to make the movie. We have an incredible design team on this one, and a totally new paradigm shift in filmmaking for us, so we are very excited to see how things are developing.

The consistent element is that our films consider issues that deeply impact us individually and collectively, but may otherwise be missing from the current marketplace of ideas. Each story determines whether it ends up as a documentary, a narrative feature, or even a more epic-length endeavor such as one project that requires two completely different scripts set 500 years apart. We have one film called Acts of God which is a love story that evolves in the context of the global trafficking situation. It is so rigorous, it's being written as a novel first, just to provide the kind of depth of backstory that it deserves. We are also in the process of a feature biopic that tells the story of one of the founding mothers of our country.

Our films can be viewed on theater screens, televisions, computer screens, or on iPhones, but they also are of a nature that they generate what we used to call in the 60s “happenings.” As screening “events,” they can apply in a lot of situations like colleges, conferences, big churches, home groups—anywhere people are interested in considering some of these greater issues together.

With Laundry and Tosca, that has had surprising success in the shape of a screening, a mini-concert with Ms. Whitehead, and speaker Lauralee Farrer. We began to notice a trend—starting with film festival Q&A sessions—that the film generated questions questions like: What does it mean to pursue your dreams? What does it sound like to be “called by God”? What does it cost to say “yes”? What unconventional dividends does it pay? What kind of life does it give you in the process—is it worth the price? We have done this event all over the country now to very high praise, but what’s more important is that audiences want to talk about what it means to their own lives and communities.

With The Fair Trade we envision screenings with fair trade-related talks to follow. All our films—even our narrative features like Praying the Hours—investigate issues that have implications for the way we live. We’ve found that people want to get together to view them and discuss what it means to us as a community. That’s what interests us—influencing the greater conversation.