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God only knows

In the middle of Imperial County, Calif., just southeast of the Salton Sea on a dust-bowl strip of sand and rock, Leonard Knight pumps his octogenarian legs and pedals a weather-worn bicycle along the windy path to Salvation Mountain. He is a small speck in the barren landscape, and up ahead the only thing more eye-catching than the iridescent sun shining down is an unmistakable hand-painted beacon proclaiming, “God is love.”

Trailing him is a camera operated by LSU screenwriting professor Zack Godshall, whose 2007 drama Low and Behold was an official selection at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. Goshall’s critically acclaimed new documentary, God’s Architects, shows how Knight, living in solitude since the early 1980s, used adobe and donated cans of paint to turn a forgotten hill into a multi-colored spiritual wonderland that attracts campers and curiosity seekers daily. The feature-length film reveals other poignant stories, too, as it focuses on five uniquely enigmatic individuals who feel divinely inspired to build handcrafted monuments to their Lord or their lost loved ones.

Inspired by architect Emilie Taylor, who received a travel grant in 2005 as a Tulane graduate student to research self-taught builders in the South, Godshall spent four years on and off with the project. In that period he took several days to photograph these visually stunning structures and to record hours of interview footage with each of the subjects from Chauvin to Niland, Calif. Taylor helped by co-producing the film.

Godshall’s subjects are not only outsider artists. In a lot of ways, they are outsider people too. And they each challenged Godshall’s filmmaking skills in different ways. Reverend H.D. Dennis, then 92, was hard of hearing but boldly outspoken. “I had to improvise a lot,” Godshall says. “For some, I just had to let them lead.”

Floyd Banks Jr. of Greenback, Tenn., is the most animated and quirky of the bunch with his prankster’s grin and maple-syrup drawl. One day in 1992 Banks stopped building houses and began erecting a castle, even though he wasn’t sure why. Ten years later, he says, God revealed to him the divine purpose of the monument: to honor his late brother who died the year he began construction. Since then, he says an image of his brother’s face has appeared in dozens of places on the castle’s concrete walls. Godshall’s camera captures a few of them, along with a series of strikingly surreal images and rural landscapes.

But it is Shelby Ravellette and Leonard Knight who form the emotional center of God’s Architects. Ravellette’s daughter, Lacey Michele, died at age 7 from flu complications. Shortly after, in the midst of a deep depression, Ravellette says she came to him in a vision to remind him that he once promised to build a castle for her. That was more than 20 years ago, and Ravellette’s massive castle now stands in the woods of Northwest Arkansas but remains a work in progress. “If the Lord answers my prayer, the day he takes me home I’ll be out here laying rock,” he says.

Whether realized or not, there is a humility in each of these people, one that must come from believing wholeheartedly that their tools are God’s tools, and their purpose is His.

“I learn things the hard way, but I’m stubborn about one thing,” Knight tells Godshall. “I’m determined and dedicated to put ‘God is love’ to this whole world. Just because I’m puny doesn’t mean God Almighty can’t use me. The more puny I get, the bigger God can use me. I’m the puniest person there ever was. I’m nothing. But the mountain is here.”

While many Millennials and Gen-Xers bounce from one career to the next and either dismiss the idea of a purposeful life or flounder in their attempts to find it, Godshall has a made a beautiful film about a handful of outsiders who believe strongly in what they are doing.

“Making this film, I really learned to be open to new ideas and new possibilities,” Godshall says. “Each of these people has found a distinct purpose that drives them, and that is invigorating. It really is.”

After screening the documentary at the New Orleans Film Festival and others including the Southern Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers, Godshall brings the film to Baton Rouge for a special screening and Q&A session at the Manship Theatre on Jan. 27 at 7:30 p.m. Godshall is self-distributing God’s Architects on DVD, too. Copies are for sale at Godshall’s Web site. His next film is the upcoming Lord Byron, a feature-length narrative drama he shot last year with Lafayette-based actors and musicians. godsarchitects.com