Plot

Lapsed Mormon Geoff Pingree retraces the steps he took twenty-five years ago in Guatemala as devout missionary 'Elder Pingree'. Combining archival material and contemporary footage as it moves from jungle village to national capital, THE RETURN OF ELDER PINGREE pairs the young Elder Pingree's earlier, single-minded journey with the older Geoff Pingree's ambivalent return to Guatemala now as he seeks to discover what has become of the Guatemalans who once trusted him with their religious faith, attempts to understand the violent and unsettling political conditions of which he was ignorant as a regimented missionary, and grapples with the basic human dilemma of how one can and ought to do good in the world.—Geoff Pingree

A man stands in a line of passengers as it moves through an airport security and passport checkpoint. Visibly exhausted from a long flight, he barely notices the boisterous crowd surging around him, yet his face is anxious, his body tense. After twenty-five years, the man is trying to find his way home - not to the place of his birth, but to a world that once transformed him. And he is searching for kin - not blood relatives, but people who long ago touched him deeply, and whose lives he shaped in ways that he is both anxious and fearful to discover.

THE RETURN OF ELDER PINGREE -- MEMOIR OF A DEPARTED MORMON follows lapsed Mormon Geoff Pingree as he retraces the steps he took twenty-five years earlier in Guatemala as devout missionary 'Elder Pingree'. Recreating Elder Pingree's world from the late 1970s and early 1980s, the documentary moves from jungle village to coastal town to national capital, recounting the dramatic events, emotional highs and lows, and strict behavioral boundaries that defined his missionary experience. Elder Pingree walked hundreds of miles, visited scores of families, and eventually baptized into the Church roughly a hundred Guatemalans.

But the film pairs that earlier, single-minded journey with Geoff Pingree's ambivalent return to Guatemala twenty-five years later. Geoff Pingree has not attended church in more than two decades, and he does not accept many of Mormonism's doctrines. Yet he is not comfortable casually rejecting the religion and culture of his upbringing or dismissing the power of his experiences as a missionary. He has never felt at ease about his mission, has never reconciled the genuine, warm relationships he shared with many Guatemalans or his influence for good on their lives, with his own distance from the religion and lifestyle that those same people thank him for sharing with them.

On his return, Geoff Pingree uneasily seeks to find and to face the Guatemalans who once trusted him with their faith - the people he taught and baptized. Will they even remember him? Or will they judge him a hypocrite for turning away from the life he taught them to live? Not once since his mission has he looked at the journals he kept, the letters he wrote or received, or the photographs he took, but he feels he must confront what his mission has meant to the people he taught and to himself.

Geoff Pingree also knows that the country in which he labored from 1979 to 1981 has changed as much as he has. Elder Pingree was convinced he could help improve an impoverished nation with his gospel message. Yet as a sheltered and regimented missionary, he was ignorant of the violent political upheaval that surrounded him. Elder Pingree was in Guatemala during the height of its civil war, when left-wing guerrillas and government paramilitary squads kidnapped and killed tens of thousands. Although that war officially ended in 1996, the country today remains economically unstable and dangerously violent.

Despite living and working there for two years, then, Elder Pingree was in many ways a stranger to Guatemala's greatest tragedies, and Geoff Pingree is uncomfortable with his earlier naiveté, troubled by the fact that although as a missionary he worked in good faith, he was blind to widespread unrest and unaware of important opportunities to ease suffering. He also wonders about the people he taught and converted: did they embrace the Mormon Church because they believed it was true, or did they accept it because they believed in him?

Elder Pingree's world is revealed through abundant archival material (over two thousand 35mm slides, four written journals, scores of of letters, and several audiotapes), while Geoff Pingree's return twenty-five years later is portrayed through live-action footage of that journey, and both are reflected upon through the voice-over observation of Geoff Pingree today. The documentary's narrative conceit thus involves splitting one person into two chronologically disparate characters and reflecting on the relation between these two from the perspective of a third distinct persona.

Elder Pingree was certain he was preaching the truth, sure he was doing the Lord's work; Geoff Pingree struggles to understand why he left the Mormon Church just four years after his mission, and he questions his own motives for helping other people. In tracing Elder Pingree's path and seeking out his converts, Geoff Pingree aims to square old convictions with new ones, to make sense of once-sacred rituals in which he himself can no longer participate. And in finding Elder Pingree, he hopes to confront a missionary past that is both meaningful and troubling.

THE RETURN OF ELDER PINGREE blends DVCam PAL digital video footage with a lesser amount of Kodak Ektachrome Super8MM reversal film footage to underscore the difficult and slippery relations among documents, memories, and ongoing experiences. In addition to Elder Pingree's wealth of photographs, documents, and sound recordings, the film includes on-camera interview and location shoot footage and features an original musical score.