I sometimes refer to my church, Immanuel Presbyterian in Los Angeles, as Noah’s Ark, because we seem to have two of everything.  Two nuclear physicists, two lesbians, two folks from Egypt … you get the idea.

As it turns out, we also have two filmmakers:  myself and Leanna Creel.  Leanna and I tend to see the world in images and stories.  Sometimes, we see those compelling images and stories in places that other folks overlook.

So in July 2007, when we learned that one of our church’s deacons, a Guatemalan woman named Yolanda, was facing imminent deportation because she was an undocumented immigrant, and that Yolanda’s 17-year-old daughter Anabella was in imminent danger of being physically deprived of her mother when she most needed her, we picked up our cameras.

The result is the documentary film Sanctuary’s Daughter.  Three years after we began production, the film isn’t finished.  And neither is the story.

When our story started, Yolanda and Anabella lived in a small apartment just down the street from Immanuel.  Immanuel had long been their second home; but in the face of Yolanda’s immigration threat, the church said, we will now be their first home.  It created a small apartment—a sanctuary—for Yolanda and Anabella inside its walls.  They woudn’t be entirely safe from the authorities.  But they would be spiritually safe.  And they would bear public witness, from inside those stone walls, to the urgent need for healing in America’s broken immigration system—one that threatened to tear small families like theirs apart, every single day.

Over the past three years, we have shot more than 100 hours of footage.  While Yolanda continues to live in sanctuary at Immanuel—working in our soup kitchen, taking in laundry, and tending a rooftop garden—Anabella has ventured more and more courageously into the world.  Key scenes in the film include Anabella’s powerful encounter with angry, bullhorn-bearing anti-immigration protesters; her high school graduation (the first person in her family ever to achieve this goal); and her journey to Washington DC in March 2010, to participate in a massive immigration reform march, and to meet with her Congressional representative about her mother’s case, and the plight of millions of undocumented immigrants in America.

This is not a theoretical immigration story, or an excuse to put forth our personal views on our country’s immigration policy.  It is a story about our friends, and the threat of their family being torn apart.  Our goal is to do our work in a balanced way, avoiding the polarizing conflict that is this story’s context.  Once complete, we hope to screen the film in churches all over America—conservative, progressive, and everything in between—as well as in schools, universities, and film festivals, to help create open, constructive dialogue about our nation’s troubled immigration system, and the fairest, most humane way to fix it.

It has been our absolute privilege to document this timely and timeless story; a story that, in its universality and intense intimacy, often feels practically biblical.  Perhaps it will inspire you to notice a little more deeply, a bit more keenly, the incredible faith journeys being enacted on the doorsteps and under the archways of your own church.

Further information about Sanctuary’s Daughter may be found at our website, www.sanctuarysdaughter.com.  To support the mission of Sanctuary’s Daughter, or to request a copy of the trailer, please contact the filmmakers at info@channelroadfilms.com_.

Mason Funk has written or produced documentaries on topics from Mother Teresa to the history of secret Oval Office recordings to a penguin’s first year of life.  He is is the founder and president of Channel Road Films, based in Los Angeles.