Faith Filled Christmas (2017)

"Faith Filled Christmas" (formerly "Salted Christmas"), produced by Manifest Pictures, is a faith-based comedy film centering on one family and their desire to replicate the example of Jesus as they celebrate the Christmas season. The entire film takes place on one Saturday in December prior to Christmas. The tagline of the film is "One family. One day. One purpose." The two main characters, Simon and Mildred Fairway (both Caucasians), reside on the independent-living side of a retirement community. On this particular Saturday, the retirement-community administrator must be out for the entire day at business meetings, so she delegates responsibility to her newly-hired assistant. Simon, who is supposed to accompany his wife Mildred to visit their children for the day, begs off going with her and stays behind to help his stir-crazy friend and fellow resident Byron, who has decided that this is his chance to stage an Olympic-style games day for the community residents, to bring them some Christmas spirit in the form of laughter and fun. Now on her own, Mildred convinces her skeptic friend Betty to join her on her trip, and they head to the home of her son Walter, an African-American they adopted when he was 12. Walter and his wife Ruth (also African-American) are raising two adopted 17-year-old sons (one African-American, one Caucasian) and fostering a 3-year-old Hispanic girl, and they decide to take the girl to visit her biological mother while Mildred and Betty join the grandsons to attempt some evangelism on the beach; one of the boys hopes to see his homeless biological mother while they are there--will he? The film is a drama with numerous moments of humor; it depicts a family that is actively involved in foster care, adoption, homeless ministry, and nursing-home ministry, and the moments those ministries create. It is a film about the joyous adventure that constitutes the Christian life, and as it was filmed in South Florida, it presents a rich tapestry of cultures and ethnicities.