Filmmaker branching out after award-winning 'Evil'

"Deliver Us From Evil" was director Amy Berg's first feature-length documentary. She'd worked for CNN and CBS and had also been a freelance producer. She'd covered the child-abuse scandal within the Catholic Church, when, in 2005, she decided to quit and form her own production company. She wanted to do a long piece about one priest. She needed time to earn the trust of his victims. She also needed time to gain the trust of the man himself.

"Deliver Us From Evil" was her first experience working without a deadline and being able to include all the background information and documentation she wished to include. She needed to be able to linger when she interviewed people who had been abused, Berg said. She needed to give them time to recover before she asked to talk to them again.

Former priest Oliver O'Grady molested dozens of children in several different parishes. In 2005 he had been released from prison and was living in Ireland. Berg talked to him by telephone for five months before he allowed her to come meet him with a camera.

Berg will be in Salt Lake City next week when the Salt Lake Film Center shows "Deliver Us From Evil" at Westminster College. She spoke to the Deseret Morning News earlier this week from her home in Santa Monica, Calif. Though the film is only a year old and won awards at several film festivals — and was nominated for a 2007 Academy Award — she said it has been awhile since she talked about it.

"I'm working on a number of other projects." Although she hasn't been actively promoting this film, she said "Deliver Us From Evil" continues to be rented and purchased, and she does get calls.

This past summer, O'Grady's former superior, Cardinal Roger Mahoney, was in the news as the Los Angeles Archdiocese settled out of court, paying victims $660 million. ""It was a great victory for the survivors,"" Berg says. Her film makes the case that O'Grady's superiors knew what he was doing, even as they transferred him to other parishes.

Berg says she does not know if O'Grady has seen the film, though she did want to send him a copy. "I tried to talk to him a number of times. He never gave me his address. He's had to move six times since the film came out."

The filmmaker feels she portrayed him fairly — as a child who was abused himself, growing up to perpetuate the cycle of abuse. It was other journalists writing about the film who called O'Grady a monster, Berg notes.

She adds that he really never acknowledged the seriousness of what he had done, and she feels his church contributed to his sense that he was above reproach.

The 37-year-old Berg is now at work on a script about Alaska. "It's about Native Alaskan people who, in the 1960s and 1970s, were taken away from their families and put in foster homes. Whose spirituality and culture were taken from them."

If you go. . .

What: "Deliver Us From Evil"

Where: Vieve Gore Concert Hall, Westminster College, 1840 S. 1300 East

When: Wednesday, 7 p.m.

How much: free

Phone: 746-7000

Web: www.slcfilmcenter.org

Also: Director Amy Berg will answer questions after the film.

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E-MAIL: susan@desnews.com