Summary: French producer Christophe Hanauer, maker of the 7 Churches of the Revelation films, gives interesting background and context to the dual e-cinema release of the film Times of Deception and the book, The Mysteries of the Apocalypse. (Premier Online Home Event the weekend of April 29-May 1)
“And to the angel of the church in Philadelphia write: ‘The words of the holy one, the true one, who has the key of David, who opens and no one will shut, who shuts and no one opens. – Revelation 3:7 (ESV)
A Short Life Story
My name is Christophe Hanauer and I am a 41-year-old research and development engineer in the field of energy. I was born in France but have lived in Switzerland since 2010. I knew the Christian faith as a child but my “scientific” education led me to believe that the Bible and faith in God were fables for naive people: a good engineer could not believe in God!
My father, who worked in the medical profession, witnessed a number of medically documented miracles in the villages where we lived near the German and Swiss borders as spiritual revival, healings, and miracles were taking place through the work of the Holy Spirit in the church “La porte-ouverte Chrétienne” in Mulhouse. He testified to us about cases of incurably ill people who were healed and this impacted me because I knew these people.
In 2007 I was confronted with a major personal crisis following a terrible car accident where my girlfriend almost lost her life, and I remembered that there might be a solution: Jesus. I cried out to him without believing and he manifested himself to me and directed my life.
In 2015 I went to the jungle in Burma to seek a life mission. While reading the Bible it became clear to me that to change the world it was necessary to change the heart of man, but how?
When a sermon is preached the audience loses maybe 98% of the message after one day, but a well-made film can cause a mental tattoo that lasts a lifetime. The impact of sound, images, the message, and the emotions combined is very powerful. I started wanting to make films out of conviction.
The Adventure of the 7 Churches of Revelation
Seeing the immense number of Christian books but the small place of the DVD department in the Christian stores, I decided to make films. I wondered how I should do it?
I wanted to go to a film school in Geneva, but I made a trip to Israel with the great scholar Jean-Marc Thobois, and what I discovered there as biblical archaeological evidence was so exciting that I decided to take my study budget and go straight to practice by producing a learning documentary.
I needed a director and I got in touch with Etienne Magnin, a young technician from my church in Mulhouse who was doing some video work. I felt that Etienne had been given a special gift for films but hadn’t had a chance to prove it yet. What followed proved us right. He accepted the project and we embarked on a trip to Israel to film Jerusalem, the Holy Land.
We sold our first DVD to the participants of that trip and our friends in June 2017. The passion was born.
In the summer of 2017 my mother was dying of cancer and I needed a project to see the future beyond the ordeal. While reading Revelation, I was surprised to read specific and concrete city names like Patmos, Ephesus etc… Wasn’t this book only pictorial and spiritual? Could it be that it was partly rooted in reality? This became my subject of investigation. I called my friend Etienne Magnin back and asked him if he would go on an adventure with me. We bought the tickets to do the first shooting in Turkey in November 2017.
Miracles During Our Adventure
The image that sums up the whole project is that of a snow removal truck that opened the way. We just had to follow the trail by faith. Without the Lord’s favor, it would have been impossible because we had almost no experience. Money has been a very big concern, but we have always been able to pay the bills and through the succession of miracles.
This project took us four and a half years to complete and surpassed our estimates of work, size and complexity by a factor of 10. The Lord’s favor has been permanent. For example, we booked the plane tickets six weeks before the shoot and contacted the embassies only afterwards. They informed us that the examination procedure takes at least six months! But a girl from our team met by chance in a park, Zeynep, a Turkish woman who worked for Peripheri Films in Istanbul. She was able to take care that we received the proper permissions for the day!
The meeting with Chantal Barry, co-producer of The Watchers, was also supernatural – as was the meeting with Thinking Man Films.
A member of our team was working at a Christian radio station in Switzerland and got in touch with a colleague, Stéphane Bonvallet, who knew the “Swiss Army knife” of cinema in the US, Joan Tankersley. Stéphane was given a file of our film a few days before NRB 2020 (the National Religious Broadcasters convention) and he gave it to Joan.
By chance, Joan ran into Timothy Mahoney at the NRB (National Religious Broadcasters) and she was able to give him the file of our work. Etienne and I searched for Timothy’s work on Netflix and discovered Patterns of Evidence: The Exodus. We knew right away Tim had the same heartfelt motivation that we had. It strengthened and inspired us.
A few days later Stephane Bonvallet caught Covid and died in March 2020 in the hospital in Paris. This is perhaps the last fruit that his spiritual life bore and it continues to extend to the ends of the earth.
The Message and Its Impact
Our motivation was to give context to the complicated texts of Revelation and to allow those interested to grasp the authentic dimension and incontrovertible evidence that this text is part of a very real, historical, archaeological and cultural context. The discovery of the relevance and accuracy of the details of the biblical text with the archaeological reality of the field is exciting.
It is impossible to grasp the full substance of Christ’s message to his church without understanding the depth of the “allusions” in Revelation. This concerns, for example, the capture of Sardis by the Persians, the occult and repressive context of Pergamum, and the lukewarm and emetic water of Laodicea.
Understanding all this allows one to have a much more precise and clearer picture of the message: things from the 2D black and white pages of the Bible suddenly appear in 3D color with sounds and smells as well!
We were able to interview a large number of first-rate specialists and they helped us understand how the message given to the churches is still absolutely relevant today. The challenges of the Church 2000 years ago are still the same for the communities of the whole world in the 21st century.
We have concentrated the series on the theme of the 7 churches with 8 episodes that speak about them. The last one is about the rest of the book of Revelation.
It became clear that the Church is facing two main dangers: an external danger, which is the violence of persecution and an internal danger, which is the danger of the seduction of sin, of “worldly” pleasures, and of false doctrines and various misguidance.
Thinking Man Films has been inspired to create two feature films based on this architecture. Thus was developed Times of Fire and now releasing Times of Deception. To accompany the films, I strongly advise you to acquire the book Les mystères de l’Apocalypse that I had the privilege to write with the scholar Jean-Marc Thobois. Thobois is certainly one of the greatest evangelical scholars in the world of the last 50 years. His work is immense and of extreme depth even though he is not (yet) known in the USA.
This book covers the themes of the 7 churches but also of the end times with a very original approach from the angle of Jewish prophecy. The “product suite” is complete: you can study the message of the 7 churches in detail with the series and the book (ideal for churches and home groups) or be entertained with the two feature films.
What’s Next?
Since this project was initiated, the world presents a radically different face. So much has changed in these past two and a half years! The world crisis of the Coronavirus has tipped humanity into a new era. The uncertainty of the world is great. Humanity has lost confidence in science, the media, and political authorities. It has been shown that in spite of all the human goodwill, some grains of sand can block the whole human activity on the earth because of globalization.
This is also an opportunity to stop, step back, and look up to another reality, that of heaven, and ask the real questions of life, the ones concerning eternity. In these times the book of Revelation is one that encourages those who seek God, those who know him and need strength to get through this life victoriously.
For me too, the time of reckoning has come. My conclusion is that God is faithful and reliable. We can place our trust in him because he loves us in spite of all our faults.
The book of Revelation is so reliable in terms of its context that its message becomes all the more credible and trustworthy. It announces that “globalized” things are coming and invites us to be close. I have learned that we are but a few things, and that the Lord glorifies himself in our weakness. This should encourage us to grow in humility, seek the things of God first, get our lives in order individually, and learn to love again.
Today the message is available in English, German, French, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Spanish, Polish, Korean, Farsi, Turkish, and Arabic. I would like to work on other topics as finances permit (we gladly accept donations by emailing Thinking Man Films here) and hope that you will be impacted and transformed by this powerful message of love. We thank our friends and partners at Thinking Man Films for this joint venture and hope that many people will be impacted for eternity. For this to happen we must Keep Thinking.
TOP PHOTO: Christophe Hanauer during filming of Times of Deception. (© Millenium Productions)
