Presented to: Greg Whiteley
For: New York Doll
New York Doll may well represent the most important contribution to LDS cinema in the last twenty years. On the one hand its restraint results in a propaganda-free production that has been enjoyed by a broad and diverse audience, yet on the other hand it neither eschews Mormon doctrine and culture nor takes a didactic stance against perceived laziness and hypocrisy in the Mormon center, and it thus represents the best Mormonism has to offer.
Seeing Arthur Kane's spiritual journey inspires us to join him in a pilgrimage through Gethsemane and Golgotha until we witness how one of the least of the Latter-day Saints may indeed reach exaltation. The documentary footage proceeds at such a pace that allows it to acquire such syntactic and spiritual density that each phrase, each nuance, comes to resonate with irony, humor, devotion, and pure love. Indeed, Greg Whiteley and his crew have succeeded in creating a film imbued with charity, and there can be no greater praise for a work of art, LDS or otherwise.