Saila Kariat on Adapting Jesus Land, Finding Hope in Trauma, and Giving David His Own Voic

Filmmaker Saila Kariat takes on deeply personal material with Jesus Land, adapting Julia Scheeres’ memoir for the screen. The story explores racism, religious extremism, abuse, identity, and family trauma while keeping the relationship between Julia and her adopted brother David at its emotional center. I spoke with Kariat about her personal connection to the material, adapting real-life trauma for the screen, creating distinct visual worlds, and what she hopes audiences take away from the film.

Reviews & Dunn: You’ve said Julia Scheeres’ memoir connected with you personally because you also grew up as one of the few people of color in your school. How did that personal connection influence the way you adapted Jesus Land for the screen?

Saila Kariat: David’s experience as an outsider resonated with me because I knew what it felt like to grow up feeling different from the people around me. I grew up as a person of color in Edmonton, Alberta, during that same period. I still remember something that happened in third grade. During recess, my teacher, Mrs. Chupka, called me in and asked why I always played alone. I told her I enjoyed playing with a ball. Looking back, I realize I was probably much more isolated than I understood at the time. I was rarely invited to birthday parties or other social outings, and I don’t think I fully recognized how isolated I was as a child.

I also saw something of myself in David’s sensitivity and good nature. He struck me as a gentle, vulnerable child trying to find his place in a world that didn’t always welcome him.

Those personal connections shaped my adaptation, but they also made me conscious of the need to look beyond my own experience. A memoir is necessarily told through the author’s perspective, and Jesus Land is very much Julia’s story.

In the film, I wanted David to emerge as a fully realized individual in his own right rather than someone we see only through Julia’s eyes. I wanted audiences to better understand his personality, sensitivity, and experience navigating a world that often rejects him—not simply see him through his relationship with Julia.

At the same time, I wanted to preserve the complexity of their bond. David is more than Julia’s source of strength or someone she feels protective toward. He has his own presence, vulnerability, and way of experiencing the world.

Reviews & Dunn: Jesus Land deals with religious extremism, racism, abuse, and family trauma, but at its center is the bond between Julia and her adopted brother. How important was it to make that relationship the emotional anchor rather than allowing the darker material to overwhelm the film?

Saila Kariat: Julia drew enormous strength, grounding, and hope from her relationship with David. At Escuela Caribe, where the environment encouraged betrayal and snitching, that bond became especially important. Julia emerged from the experience more intact than some of the other kids because she had David—someone she could trust, confide in, and rely on. Even when they were forbidden to speak to each other, they found ways to support one another. Their bond gave Julia stability in an environment designed to break people down.

It was critical for me to preserve the hope and love in their relationship as a counterbalance to the abuse, racism, and religious extremism surrounding them. That meant making some difficult choices. I had to limit the scenes of abuse, both at home and at Escuela Caribe, because too much could become overwhelming for audiences and risk obscuring the larger story. I constantly tried to balance light and darkness—staying truthful to the brutality of their experiences without losing sight of the love, tenderness, and connection that sustain them. Ultimately, Jesus Land is as much about the power of that bond as it is about the forces threatening to destroy it.

Reviews & Dunn: When adapting a memoir built from someone’s real trauma, how did you balance staying faithful to Julia Scheeres’ experiences with making the creative choices necessary for a feature film?

Saila Kariat: Adapting a memoir for the screen requires translating a deeply personal, first-person account into purely visual storytelling. To do that, I intentionally minimized narration and let the visual language of film carry the narrative weight through actors' expressions, body language, silences, and physical reactions. For instance, rather than explaining Julia’s anxiety on her first day of school, we witness her taking a nervous swig from a jar of smuggled alcohol. I also shifted several literary exposition devices into visual scenes, such as depicting key events surrounding David directly on screen rather than having Julia hear about them over an intercom.

I also restructured the story. The memoir unfolds more or less chronologically over two years, moving from Indiana to Escuela Caribe, with some childhood memories interspersed. I chose to begin the film at Escuela and use flashbacks to reveal Julia’s experiences in Indiana and her early childhood. That gave me greater control over the pacing and allowed me to build and release tension more effectively.

The author herself uses representation in memoir—the process of constructing a world from fragments of memory. I took some creative license to make the story work cinematically, including merging a few characters and creating a composite character at Escuela.

Despite those deviations, I believe the film remains faithful to the essence of the author’s experience, and she agrees.

Reviews & Dunn: The story moves from rural Indiana to a reform school in the Dominican Republic, two very different environments that both challenge these young characters. How did you approach visually and tonally separating those worlds while still showing the connection between them?

Saila Kariat: Because I moved back and forth between Indiana and the Dominican Republic, I needed to distinguish the two worlds visually so the audience could follow the story.

One way we did that was through very different color palettes. The Dominican Republic portion has a faded Caribbean palette, with weathered pastel buildings, sun-bleached yellows, muted blues and greens, and earthy neutrals. The buildings themselves are often run-down and in disrepair. Although the colors establish the tropical setting, their faded, restrained quality also helps convey the bleak, oppressive atmosphere of Escuela Caribe.

Indiana, by contrast, has a distinctly Midwestern palette, with warm autumnal tones, faded denim, muted greens, and the browns and creams of a traditional American home. We gave both settings an aged, period-appropriate look through color correction without pushing the images too far into sepia.

We treated the Florida beach scenes with young Julia and David differently, using a warm, sepia-toned, deliberately faded look with a vintage film texture. For the scenes with adult Julia on the beach, we used a more stylized, almost monochromatic palette.

Those distinctions helped the different timelines and locations feel visually distinct while giving the film a cohesive visual language.

Reviews & Dunn: You’ve said you hope Jesus Land sparks conversations about faith, identity, race, and resilience. After audiences leave the theater, what conversation do you most hope they continue having?

Saila Kariat: I believe understanding and empathy help us become more tolerant of our differences, whether in race, faith, or background. I hope the film encourages people to look beyond those differences and recognize our shared humanity. I want audiences to question whether dogma and rigidity solve anything or simply create more suffering by shutting out compassion and independent thought. Ultimately, I hope they reflect on what spirituality really means. We all experience suffering in one form or another. The question is whether that suffering makes us more compassionate toward others, or whether we let our beliefs and fears lead us to inflict suffering on them.

To me, the true measure of our spirituality is not how faithfully we follow a set of rules, but how much love and compassion we bring into the world—and how much suffering we can help prevent.