in the open space: God & culture

It is reassuring to seeing Lois Lowry in this featurette because it reminds me how involved she was in the film. Bringing novels to the bring screen is always risky, especially when it is like The Giver —not only beloved by a generation of readers (of which I am one) but a story woven rich with themes, questions, metaphors and characters that speak directly into our own lives and culture. This featurette pulls on several of those rich threads, one of which is: What do we do with the pain and suffering we experience in life and cause each other? What if everything that caused us pain could be erased or controlled? In a Wall Street Journal interview with Sohrab Ahmari , Lowry reflected on how she came up with the idea for The Giver . She was going through a difficult time in her life, and coming home from a visit with her aging parents in their nursing home. Her mother often wanted to talk about Lowry’s sister Helen, who had died young; her father, whose memory was failing, alt...