Children of the right: in Family Fundamentals, filmmaker Arthur Dong shows how religion can shatter families with gay children. (film).

With Family Fundamentals, his new documentary about conservative religious families with gay kids, Arthur Dong hopes to shock many gays and lesbians out of their complacency about the religious right.

"Oftentimes the gay community just kind of laughs [at Christian conservatives]," he says. "They just kind of shove it aside, like, `Oh, this is just a bunch of fanatics.' But you know, they're not. They're large and organized and well-funded, and we have to deal with them."

This statement-confrontational yet calm--is characteristic of Dong, whose films are united by their commitment to representing both sides of seemingly intractable conflicts. His best-known film, 1994's Coming Out Under Fire, which won a Sundance jury award, deals with gays in the military; 1997's Licensed to Kill profiles men convicted of murdering gays.

"It frustrates some audiences because they want to be told what to think," Dong says of his approach. "People complained about Licensed to Kill. They wanted to be told, like, `Those people are bad and we are good.' But life's not that simple. That's the whole point."

This message is evident in Family Fundamentals, which opened in selected cities October 11. It documents two families, one Pentecostal and one Mormon, in which children came out and subsequently became estranged from their parents. It also examines the relationship between former congressman Bob Dornan, a vocal opponent of gay rights, and Brian Bennett, his onetime chief of staff. Bennett lived with the Dornan family for six years and was treated like a son until he came out in 1997.

The unifying force in these situations is, of course, religion. Not a believer himself, Dong looks with bemusement at faith's strange power in American life. "When I researched school board meetings or debates on a local level that deal with gay issues, someone's always bringing a Bible up to the podium," he says. "There's always somebody saying that this is why we need to reject a certain bill, why we can't let a straight-gay student alliance have a club on campus. It's frightening."

Still, Dong was more sympathetic to his fundamentalist subjects than their children were. He did everything possible to view them without bias, assembling an advisory board that included Forest Montgomery; a former attorney for government affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals, and Mel White, an evangelical pastor and author who worked with Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson until coming out in 1991.

Dong credits some of the film's more intimate moments to his shooting method. He did all the filming himself, using digital video equipment bought with a grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Without a crew, he was able to establish a sense of trust with his subjects and a feeling of spontaneity for the film. "Since I wasn't spending a whole lot of money on a crew, I could just release myself," he says. "[I could say,] `If it doesn't work, it doesn't work.'"

Even so, Dong didn't win all of his subjects over. He had to make the film without cooperation from Dornan, and Brett Mathews's Mormon parents dropped out in the middle of shooting. And Dong's gay subjects could be stubborn as well. "The gay kids figured that I was just going to go along with them," he remembers. "I'd say, `Wait a minute, I just talked to your mom over the phone. That's not the way I hear it.'"

Family Fundamentals illustrates this divide with a segment on Kathleen Bremner, who is active in the reparative therapy movement, and Susan and David Jester, Bremner's lesbian daughter and gay grandson. Interviewed first, David Jester complains about his grandmother and her movement's "extreme hatred for homosexuals."

"But they don't hate you," Dong says off-camera. "They love you. They said so."

"I still feel like I'm hated," Jester answers back. Dong then cuts to Bremner in her home, where, surrounded by framed photos of her daughter and grandson, she prays earnestly for them.

For Dong, this scene points to a surprising truth. "What I always wanted was to find some common ground for reconciliation," he says. "Now, having shown the film in different parts of the country, I can see that there is a common ground, but it's not what I expected. The common ground is pain. There's this pain that no one wants, in families [and] in our country."

Lehoczky writes regularly for the Chicago Tribune.