![]() “There are very, very few of them,” he explained. The Guarani themselves were not an option. With Bolt’s approval, Joffé went in search of an indigenous community that might fit the bill. Joffé told Bolt he was interested in adapting the play, with one recommendation: “We’d need to bring the Indians to life.” “It was very touching struggle to find his words,” Joffé remembered. In 1979 a stroke had paralyzed Bolt’s right side and made it almost impossible for him to speak. “Poor Robert was a bit of a forgotten man,” Jim Clark wrote in his memoir, Dream Repairman. “He said, ‘I’d always thought this would make a wonderful film.’” “After I’d done ‘The Killing Fields,’” Joffé told America, “I met Robert Bolt and an Italian producer named Fernando Ghia.” Bolt, whose body of work included the screenplays for “Lawrence of Arabia,” “A Man for All Seasons” and “Doctor Zhivago,” had an unproduced stage play about a saintly Jesuit and a former slave owner who is trying to redeem himself in the Jesuit reductions in Paraguay. But Joffé and his producing partner, David Puttnam, had something more in mind for their “Killing Fields” team. Usually, when a project ends the members of the production team go their separate ways. It was Roland Joffé’s feature film debut, and it received seven Oscar nominations, winning three-including to Chris Menges for cinematography and to Jim Clark for editing. In 1984 “The Killing Fields,” a drama about the Khmer Rouge, debuted to great acclaim. For those involved, the making of “The Mission” would unexpectedly recreate elements of the original experience of the Jesuits and the Guarani, and the movie would inspire a new generation of missionaries. McNaspy, among others, Warner Brothers released a film in 1986 about that shining, tragic moment in Catholic history. ![]() Inspired by research on the reductions by the Jesuits Philip Caraman and C. The story of a film that became an inspiration to Jesuits and their companions worldwide. But eventually the Jesuits were expelled for standing up to Spanish and Portuguese slave- and landholders, and the missions collapsed. For a time the Catholic music created by the Guarani transfixed the Christians of Europe. Known collectively as the Jesuit Republic or Lost Paradise, the Jesuit missions, or reductions, combined 17th- and 18th-century visions of the kingdom of God with a respect for indigenous culture that infuriated the secular powers that had allowed the Jesuits access to the region in the first place. Among the many works of the Society of Jesus in its nearly 500-year history, its missions among the Guarani people of present-day Paraguay and Bolivia remain perhaps its most fabled.
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