As a response to others: Places like this do exist. When you talk about how rare they are and refer to them as "armpits" you are only expressing your ignorance. This movie is not trying to convey the South. It is this small town southern culture that you are oblivious to that they are trying to show and they do so effectively.Firstly, the cinematography is hair raisingly beautiful. The color used almost looks Hollywood in style. The grays greens and browns are bleak and beautiful. Secondly the characters are excellently picked. Jim is a little stiff but is sincere enough that he is believable. His cowboy philosophy gets to be a little much at times but slows down towards the end of the film. The music throughout just adds to the story and also slows down in the second half. I really don't want to talk about too much just watch and be taken into a world that you may not be familiar with (even if you live in the same region).

I am a huge fan of Jim White the musician, and I didn't make it through more than 23 minutes of this film. Now maybe things changed later; I'll grant that. Right at the beginning of the film, White procures a concrete statue of Jesus. He and some others remove it from where it lies in state along the entire length of the inside of a car trunk. But when it goes into the trunk of his seemingly equally large car, it protrudes beyond the back of the car, as if it doesn't fit--so we can see White's burden. It seems a telling incident: the heavy-handed symbolism and artsy contrivance stick out from White's cinematic vehicle like...well, You Know Who.By the time I stopped, nearly all of the people I'd seen talking were No Depression- magazine-darling musicians and other people who might have used the film toward an MFA. Not that there's anything wrong with the highly qualified and sometimes actually Southern talent here. (I especially enjoyed Harry Crews' storytelling.) But the film purports to be a sort of documentary road trip, exploring Southern spiritual culture, and instead was on its way to becoming--I repeat, I quit a third of the way in--a sometimes evocatively pretty, sometimes maddeningly awkward music video.Why drive around the Louisiana bayous if the people you "find" playing banjos and singing spirituals are, like you, likely to have tour schedules on MySpace?I emphasize: Jim White is a musical genius, and this film should not dissuade anyone from checking out his work or that of artists like Crews, the Handsome Family, etc. It's just an unfortunate misstep as a movie.

Jim White narrates and takes the viewer on Jim's own personal sojourn thru the deep south.Strange and compelling individuals and musicians crop up throughout.It's a fascinating and awesome piece of work,serving as an introduction to the bizarre and twisted swamp-blues world of the great Johnny Dowd,16 Horsepower,The Handsome Family and Jim White himself.Johnny Dowd performing 'There's Been A Murder Here Today' in the back of a barber shop and Harry Crews stumbling down a country road spouting obtuse verse are pure poetry.The film makes a tributary nod to Robert Johnson by leaving a statue of the virgin Mary at the crossroads.Anyone who has a passing interest in modern day blues will find themselves tracking down the music of the featured artists without a doubt.This is truly a masterpiece and a future cult classic

Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus takes the outsider on a beautiful lyrical esoteric journey through a part of the South that most of us have never seen. In that sense, it is eye-opening. However, its Cinema Verite approach lacks context and leaves the outsider to understand that are being presenting with something truly central about the essence of the modern "South" when in reality they are only seeing a highly-selective isolated and fading subculture of the poor, rural, white, poorly-educated, mostly Pentecostal world of a few small Southern towns. By only presenting this small piece of the South, the director seems to reinforce, probably unintentionally, the negative stereotypes of Southerners as "hicks" that too many outsiders unfortunately already hold. As someone who has lived in more urban parts of Virginia and Texas for the last 26 years, I find this selective picture of the "South" to be very off-putting and incomplete. The outsider is not given the context to understand the true complexity of the American South. Most Southerners live in urban and suburban areas. The importance of African-Americans to southern culture is sadly not shown. Most Southerners are not Pentecostals speaking in tongues. Most Southerners are better educated and more sophisticated than those shown in this film. The South is an increasingly multi-cultural region as well. Nor does this picture provide the viewer with any sort of analysis or economic understanding of why this part of the rural South has been left behind. Rather than presenting the heart of the South as the film implicitly claims, it shows the margins of the modern South. That's fine and important, but without more context it risks doing a disservice to the world it is trying present fairly. The viewer would be better served by a fuller accounting of today's south and an explanation of why these people shown have been marginalized.