Followers of Shaini Goodwin, a Shelton woman who writes under the Internet handle "Dove of Oneness," are starring in a movie.
They appear in "Waiting For NESARA," a documentary by filmmakers Zeb and Elisa Haradon, who screened a rough cut Wednesday night in Seattle.
The pair spent more than a year in Utah filming meetings of the Open Mind Forum, a group of about a dozen excommunicated Mormons who read Goodwin's writings and believe her conspiracy theories.
NESARA is an acronym for a law Goodwin claims Congress secretly passed in 2000. According to Goodwin, the law would eliminate the IRS, forgive credit card and mortgage debt and declare peace. To prevent its announcement, she says, the Bush administration planned and conducted the Sept. 11 attacks and started the Iraq war.
"Waiting for NESARA" runs about 85 minutes. It combines one-on- one interviews with footage of Open Mind Forum meetings and discussions among members about world events, filtered through their beliefs in UFOs and "reptilians" - lizardlike aliens who they say have secretly infiltrated the planet.
Goodwin does not appear, except as a topic of discussion, and in excerpts of her recorded "voice reports." Her real name is never mentioned. The forum members know her as Dove, and the Haradons did not know her name until they read a recent two-part series in The News Tribune about Goodwin, the NESARA cybercult and its connections to proven financial scams.
"Our approach in the film was to focus on the people in this particular Utah-centric NESARA group we were filming, and we mention Dove only in passing," Zeb Haradon said.
The screening was a test run for the film, which has no distributor or studio backing. It's still in the editing stages.
The Haradons plan to submit it to film festivals to reach a wider audience.
Wednesday, spectators at the screening tittered as they watched members of the Open Mind Forum speak gravely of the secret law and alien plots. The audience cackled as one forum member gestured toward a cloudy Utah sky and pointed out spaceships cloaked in atmospheric disguises.
Though the film is frequently funny, it does not mock its subjects. Forum members gave the Haradons permission to film meetings and agreed to be interviewed on camera. Zeb Haradon also promised not to use their last names, though members didn't insist on it.
"The few who were worried about their identities being revealed were worried because they didn't want the 'Illuminati' to look them up and come after them," Haradon said.
On the Net
* For information about the film, go to www.waitingfornesara.com.
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Sean Robinson: 253-597-8486
sean.robinson@mail.tribnet.com
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