Two new biblical shorts announced:Jael Drives the Nail and Our Child

Two weekends ago I had the privilege of being a judge for The Pitch film fund, which offers production finance, support and training to filmmakers, particularly those based on stories from Bible. At stake were two opportunities to get £30,000 funding each to make their short film – one for comedy and one for drama. 

This year we were spoilt for choice and so it's really exciting to know these two films will soon be made, possibly even in the next year.

Jael Drives the Nail

The first is Maddie Dai's Jael Drives the Nail a comedy that takes place in Jael's tent in the moments leading up to Sisera's death (Judges 4:17-24). The story has been a long-term favourite of mine and I was so glad to be able to include the only other major treatment of – Henri Andréani's Jaël et Sisera (1911) – it in my book.

Dai is a New Zealand-born, London-based cartoonist, screenwriter, illustrator and filmmaker, whose cartoons – many of which play with religious/classical ideas – appear in "The New Yorker". As a writer she contributed to the second series of Our Flag Means Death (2023) and wrote the very funny short film Ministry of Jingle (2023) [trailer] which was also her first film in the director's chair.

Dai's degree was in religious art and hopes to make a feature on the Book of Judith, so expect that to influence proceedings, although The Pitch's announcement promises a "modern dark comedic twist" on the subject, which seems to me a perfect way to approach it. I cannot wait to see the final result.

Our Child

I'm also excited to see Anatole Sloan's Our Child, a modernised take on the story of Hagar, Abraham and Sarah (Genesis 16 & 21) relocated to modern day Hong Kong. My favourite take on this story is a comedic one (The Real Old Testament, 2003), so it will be good to see a more serious approach to it, brought into the modern day. Having contributed to an entry for the Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception on this subject and written a blog post detailing some of the other takes on it and Sloan's approach seems like an excellent way to approach the story.

Sloan is of mixed British-Chinese descent and he has explained how his take on the story, which will revolve around a young surrogate mother, will reflect "issues that I saw growing up in East Asia". Sloan has also professed his desire "to draw on the cinematic language of that region".

Sloan's previous work has been on documentaries, including The Speeches which enabled him to work with an array of household names including Idris Elba, Glenn Close, Woody Harrelson, Olivia Coleman and King Charles III.
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There's a further snippet about these films at the end of this article in Variety.

Jaël et Sisera (1911)

Amazingly this short film from 1911 is the only time any part of the story of Deborah (Judges 4-5) has been filmed in any kind of vaguely significant production. For this reason (and a few others) it's been one I've wanted to see for very many years and last week I happened to be at BFI Southbank -  where you can now access the BFI's digital library - and was able to walk in and watch it for free within a minute or two of arriving. If you're passing that way I very much recommend it. A few other old silent films are there to view as well. (For example, three films about Jephthah's daughter from a similar time period are there also).

Unfortunately, Deborah doesn't get to feature in this film either. Whilst Barak, Sisera, Jael and her husband Heber all get a part, Deborah not only remains off screen, but doesn't even get a mention in the intertitles. In some ways that's not entirely surprising, at only 10 minutes long the film has to trim the story right down and given the success of the biblical-women-slaying-Israelite-enemies-whilst-they-sleep genre (OK,mainly Judith) it's not that hard to see why Pathé and director Henri Andréani prioritised Jael.

The film starts outside Jael's tent. Things are a little unclear, but Sisera has seemingly conquered the camp because a group of Israelites are chained up, Jael is somewhat subdued and a minute or two into the picture Heber, previously described by an intertitle as being "friendly with Sisera", is brought in seemingly under a certain amount of duress. When nobody is looking Jael gesticulates towards the skies, and then breaks the chains of some of the Isarelites. They then flee to tell Barak about Sisera's location and his army marches our to battle. This opening shot, and indeed most, if not all of the film, is all filmed on location outdoors (as with Andréani's 1911 Caïn et Abel and a number of his other films).

On hearing the news of Sisera's location, Barak and his troops attack Sisera's camp in various locations, including the scene of the opening shot and one particularly pleasing shot as the Israelites chase Sisera's men up and over a hill. Another scene takes place on what looks like a beach though the intertitles describe God sending a "Kishon Torrent" to help Barak in an interesting dovetailing of Judges 4 verses 13 and 15. The torrent looks more like a lake or a sea, but the location does provide Andréani with a sizeable rock for Sisera's man to scramble upon in a fashion similar to Francis Danby's Painting "The Deluge" (c.1840), which also found its way into Darren Aronfsky's Noah (2014).

Sisera survives however, and creeps away somewhat stealthily, but Barak nevertheless manages to hunt him down. So it is that Sisera arrives back at Jael's tent and begs her to shelter him. In an echo of the first scene Jael gives Sisera water and he then collapses in exhaustion.Whilst he lies there unconscious she pulls up a large tent peg and drives it through his head (pictured above). The moment is surprisingly brutal. Whilst there's no blood and the action takes place in mid-shot, the repeated violent hammering is rather shocking.

Moments later Barak's army arrives, only to find Jael has done their work for him. Barak kneels besides Sisera's lifeless body and kisses the hem of her garment in tribute.

The quality of the print of the film is pretty impressive. I don't know enough about restoration and transfer to be able to tell whether this has been simply transferred to mp4 format or whether some restoration work has been done, but I should point out that the image above was taken rather hastily on my phone from the computer screen and so doesn't at all do it justice. The colour is quite striking, and consistent with Andréani's David et Goliath from the previous year. Particularly memorable is the shot panning up the hill as Sisera's troops seek to escape. As early biblical films goes it's an interesting mix of reliance on the text combined with the odd bit of dramatic licence when it suited the filmmakers, but perhaps most interesting is the use of somewhat shocking violence. Biblical films are well known for sword play, but rarely until the present century have they been quite so violent. Still, if ever a source text justifies such an approach, it's this.