Faith Filled Christmas (2017)

"Faith Filled Christmas" (formerly "Salted Christmas"), produced by Manifest Pictures, is a faith-based comedy film centering on one family and their desire to replicate the example of Jesus as they celebrate the Christmas season. The entire film takes place on one Saturday in December prior to Christmas. The tagline of the film is "One family. One day. One purpose." The two main characters, Simon and Emily Fairway (both Caucasians), reside on the independent-living side of a retirement community. On this particular Saturday, the retirement-community administrator must be out for the entire day at business meetings. She delegates responsibility to her newly-hired assistant. Simon's friend Byron, a stir-crazy resident, decides that this is his chance to stage an Olympic-style games day for the community residents. Simon, who is supposed to accompany his wife to visit their children for the day, begs off going with her and stays behind to stage the games in the hope of bringing some Christmas spirit (in the form of laughter and fun) into the community. Now on her own, Simon's wife Emily convinces her friend Betty (a skeptic) to join her for the day. They proceed to the home of Emily's son Walter, who turns out to be African-American and adopted when he was 12. Walter and his wife Ruth (also African-American) now have two adopted 17-year-old sons, one African-American and one Caucasian; they are also fostering a Hispanic 3-year-old girl. They process to take the little girl to visit her biological mother while Emily and Betty join her adopted grandsons to undertake some evangelism on the beach. One of them is hoping to see his biological mother (a homeless woman) while they are there, which he does. The film is a drama with numerous moments of humor and highlights a family actively involved in foster care, adoption, homeless ministry, and nursing-home ministry, and the moments those ministries create. It is a film about the joyous adventure which constitutes the Christian life. Because we filmed in South Florida, we were able to create a rich tapestry of cultures and ethnicities throughout the film.