

Created by Matt Zoller Seitz
Directed by Judith St. Germain
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
Haruki Murakami
Photo by Antonio Gabola on Unsplash
ALL COPIES SIGNED BY JEFFREY OVERSTREET (AUTHOR) AND MATT ZOLLER SEITZ (FOREWORD)
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What if watching movies could be a spiritual discipline? For one film critic, great films became guiding lights -- an escape from fear-based religion into richer experiences of imagination, beauty, community, and faith.
Growing up in a bubble of churches and Christian schools, Jeffrey Overstreet was taught by example to condemn "worldly" art and culture as predatory and poisonous. Yet, the flicker of light from cinema screens proved a temptation too powerful to resist. And what he found there was quite the opposite of what he'd been told: He found God at play in ten thousand theaters. Now, through deeply personal and eye-opening stories, Overstreet invites you to retrace a revelatory journey: from Pinocchio to My Neighbor Totoro, from Disney's Hundred-Acre Wood to The Tree of Life, from The Black Stallion to Blade Runner, from Dead Poets Society and Do the Right Thing to Moonrise Kingdom and Marcel the Shell with Shoes On.
Spoiler! Movies do not burn down Overstreet's faith. Rather, they free him to answer the Scriptures' instruction -- not only to love the world, but to learn from it. Great cinema invites us to hear a holy voice in the beauty of the natural world, and to break away from destructive distortions of Jesus's teaching. Guided by the lights of screens and Scripture, the author of Through a Screen Darkly and the fantasy novel Auralia's Colors testifies of a God who moves in mysterious ways, calling us into a life of courageous creativity.
REVIEWS
"I truly believe there is a 'golden ratio' hidden within storytelling. When revealed to an audience, is that man touching the divine? Jeffrey Overstreet's personal journey through film makes a darn good case for it." --Andrew Stanton,director and co-writer of Finding Nemo and WALL-E
"There are writers who astound me with the depth of their love and knowledge of cinema. And there are writers who pursue the truth and beauty of the divine, and reject the ignorance of the doctrinaire, with a rigor that inspires me beyond words. Jeffrey Overstreet is the very rare writer who does both. The gorgeous, jewel-like essays in Lost & Found in the Cathedral of Cinema add up to a singular confession of faith, a revelatory memoir of artistic discovery, and a much-needed reminder of God's presence in all spaces where light and darkness converge, movie theatres very much included." --Justin Chang, Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic, The New Yorker
"Jeffrey Overstreet's love of movies shines through every page of this engaging and thoughtful book. I suspect that I'm one of many readers who will be inspired by Overstreet's reflections to consider how movies have been formative in our own lives." --Kathleen Norris, author of Dakota: A Spiritual Geography and coauthor of A Whole Life in Twelve Movies
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Recognized in The New Yorker, TIME, The Seattle Times, Image, and Christianity Today for his writing on cinema, Jeffrey Overstreet IS an assistant professor at Seattle Pacific University, where he teaches creative writing, English literature, academic writing, and film studies. He earned his BA in English literature and his MFA in creative writing from Seattle Pacific University.
MZS.Press is the online arts bookstore founded by author, critic, and filmmaker Matt Zoller Seitz and Directed by Judith Carter. It offers new, used, signed, collectible, and rare books on film, TV, music, photography, and the visual arts. The store was launched in 2019 on a different platform and has expanded to incorporate arts books published by MZSPress's private imprint: titles currently include Seitz's The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon and Dreams of Deadwood, about the HBO Western, and Walter Chaw's A Walter Hill Film.
Our deepest wish is to promote, encourage, and distribute work by small presses, academic presses, and individuals. Extraordinary work tends to get swallowed up on giant platforms like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The titles featured here are personally selected by a group of curators and advisors, including Seitz and an array of critics, artists, journalists, educators, publishers, and arts mavens who are known for their ability to suss out what Seitz's jazz musician dad liked to call "the good sh*t."
"I don’t dream at night, I dream at day, I dream all day; I’m dreaming for a living,"
~Steven Spielberg
And MZS when I ask "what are you doing?"
Matt Zoller Seitz
Critic, Author, Filmmaker, MZS Press Creator
Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large and film critic of RogerEbert.com; Former Features Writer for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, Contributing Writer for D Magazine and Texas Highways as well as finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. His writing on film and TV has appeared in Sight and Sound, The New York Times, Salon.com, The New Republic and Rolling Stone. Seitz is the founder and original editor of the influential film blog The House Next Door, now a part of Slant Magazine.
Seitz has written, narrated, edited or produced over a hundred hours’ worth of video essays about cinema history and style for The Museum of the Moving Image, Salon.com and Vulture, among other outlets such as Texas Highways and AARP. His five-part 2009 video essay Wes Anderson: The Substance of Style was spun off into the hardcover book The Wes Anderson Collection. This book and its follow-up, The Wes Anderson Collection: Grand Budapest Hotel were New York Times bestsellers.
Other Seitz books include the New York Times bestsellers The Sopranos Sessions and Mad Men Carousel; TV (The Book), The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon, The Wes Anderson Collection: The French Dispatch and the new The Wes Anderson Collection: Asteroid City. He is also an interviewer, moderator, and film programmer who has curated and hosted film and TV presentations for the Museum of the Moving Image, IFC Center, San Francisco's Roxie Cinema, and other venues. In October 2024 he brought the legendary filmmaker Oliver Stone back to Dallas for a historic return to the city and the Texas Theatre, considered the biggest film event of Dallas in 2024 by Dallas Observer!
Judith St. Germain was in the Upscale and Luxury Hospitality Industry for most of her life. In 2004 she had a beautiful baby boy with Special Needs and put the pause on her career until 2017 to dedicate herself to him and then others, assisting and volunteering as a legal advocate ensuring the best medical care, evaluations and educations for Special Needs children and their families.
Matt and Judith were family friends for over 20 years. She was there with her family in support when his wife Jen passed away suddenly in 2006. Then just 6 weeks later while Matt was in Dallas; he and his Father, Dave, and Step-Mother, Genie, were there as support, when Judith was alone and her son received the first of many diagnoses that changed the trajectory of their lives. So it made sense in the turbulent year of 2020, Matt asked Judith to take over running the online store that has become MZS.press. The rest as they say is, "Their"-story.