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Posted: August 23

Jesuit TV centers on the move

(Culver City, California) Early Tuesday morning in the Loyola Productions office, and the LA morning fog hasn’t burned off. Someone said this is what they call “June gloom” – but we are in the middle of August. I will be here for some days to help in the editing of the video that this new Jesuit video production company is producing for the Society’s celebration of Jubilee 2006, the anniversaries of St. Francis Xavier, St. Ignatius, and Bl. Peter Faber. Father Eddie Siebert and his crew just finished taping the three actors who play the roles of three of the founding members of the Society of Jesus whose lives and interaction will provide the frame for the video to present contemporary examples of the way their inspiration has continued to develop and shape the Jesuits. Loyola Productions is one of the most ambitious recent Jesuit efforts in television. They are developing a TV series drawn from incidents in Jesuit history and they create many videos for Jesuit schools and provinces. Other production companies around the world are contributing footage to show local examples of the Jesuit spirit in action.

The head of another production company emailed me a few days ago saying that the company he started in East Timor has managed to get two weekly TV shows on air in that newly independent country near Australia and Indonesia. Father Ruedi Hoffman developed Puskat Audio Visual in Indonesia before moving to East Timor a few years ago. Ruedi saw the story I wrote for the Jescom web site on Loyola Marymount University’s college of film and video. From the story he learned about Father Luís Proenca , a Jesuit from Portugal who teaches at the Los Angeles university. Ruedi invited Luís to come to East Timor and lead a workshop in video production. Since Portuguese is the official language of East Timor, Luís was able to work with the 16 members of the Casa de Produção Audiovisual TV crew in their language.

Ruedi also passed on the good news that CPA has been airing two TV shows on Wednesday and Sunday since February 2004—from 6:30 to 7:00 pm. Any American producer would die to get that time slot. He has financial backing for the programs for another two years and has hopes for another project after that. The two shows, “History for the Future” and “People’s Wisdom”, aim to show citizens of the new nation stories from their heritage that were largely unknown during their years as an Indonesian colony.

”Although our programs do not touch actual politics directly, we get many very relevant letters from our viewers concerning the most urgent problems of Timor,” Ruedi writes. “I am convinced that East Timor needs this service badly in the process of developing its identity for the future and I believe very much in worldwide Jesuit cooperation.”

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