The Movie: I first heard about Devil's Playground when Jenny recommended it, and I stuck it on my Netflix queue, but it was way down in the end (my list is over 60 titles long right now). But somehow, tonight, Cami just randomly rented it from Blockbuster, so I got to see it earlier than anticipated.

This is quite an amazing and eye-opening documentary, that I highly recommend anyone see. It's about the Amish people, and a particular aspect of their beliefs that I had absolutely no idea existed -- it's so far outside what the stereotypical image of Amish people would be, but to me it adds so much more credibility to their faith.

The Amish believe that it is wrong to baptize children - that only an adult can really make the choice between whether or not they want to be a Christian. So when an Amish child turns 16 years old, they enter into the period called rumspringa, a period that can last from a few months to a few years, however long it takes.

During this time, they can go out and basically do whatever they want. They can wear "english" clothes, own and drive cars, drink alcohol, do drugs, watch TV, go to movies, listen to music, go to concerts or whatever. Basically, they get to experience everything that the world has to offer, before making their final (and life-long) decision to either return and become a member of the Amish church, or to leave and stay in the world.

It's quite interesting to me, in that their faith basically mandates that each person must make their own choice to follow that faith or not, after seeing what else is out there, which is something I haven't seen many other people doing or encouraging. I think it's a testament to the strength of the faith of the Amish people in that they are willing to allow themselves to play in what they call the Devil's playground.

This documentary was also eye-opening to me in the sense that in all my years, I never really knew anything about what Amish people believed. I only knew about the stereotypes. I learned that Amish people don't necessarily shun technology, as the stereotypes would have you believe. When they choose what is allowed or not allowed, the judgment is made along the lines of "will this hurt the community."

They don't like television, not because television is inherently evil, but because the more TV you watch, the less time you spend interacting with other people in your family or your community. They don't like cars, not because they think cars are inherently evil (in fact, they will ride in other people's cars), but because they feel that the slower pace of life is better for themselves and the community they are a part of.

Quite interesting is the fact that over 90% of Amish kids choose to stay Amish after this period, and that this rate of retention is higher now than it has been in centuries, despite the fact that the kids today have more money, and more access to the world than previous generations did.

I found this documentary highly informative, educational and interesting -- I couldn't pull myself away from it, I was just in so much shock and awe over the extremes depicted, and the strength of the Amish faith. It also really had me thinking about what I belive in, and just how deep those beliefs go. Again, I'd recommend this to anybody, though with the disclaimer that it contains a lot of coarse language and deals with a number of mature themes.

The DVD: This is a fairly bare-bones disc. The documentary was shot on video, and the DVD definitely represents that, with the images looking very much like they came from a camcorder, but at least there were very few compression artifacts, and I can fairly confidently say that this DVD stays true to the original source material. The audio was at pretty much the same level of quality of the video. Extras consist of a little "clip" (it's not even really a trailer), an audio commentary track, and about 13 minutes of deleted footage.