Summertime brings one film festival after another to Los Angeles and the latest is the 13th annual LA DocuWeeks. From July 31st to August 13th, it will showcase 28 documentaries at the Arclight Hollywood. LA2DAY caught up with the director of our top pick for the first week of screenings, Smile ‘Til It Hurts: The Up With People Story.

After 15 years of marriage, William Storey told his wife Lee that he was a former member of Up With People (UWP), the singing group/political movement that existed in some form from 1965 to 2000. The song and dance troupe always had a 100+ roster and has produced over 20,000 alumni. They've performed around the world and did the half time show for four Super Bowls in the 1980s. Naturally, Lee Storey was curious about her husband's past. "I was intrigued," she says. "I wanted to find out about his history."

Storey is a lawyer and had never made a film before, but once she started meeting other former member and watching archival footage of UWP, she felt compelled to help the story be told.

Up With People was started by Frank Buchman, a Christian evangelist and founder of a movement called Moral Re-Armament (MRA). Described by a former member as "a cult-like religious organization that had done a lot of work after World War II in Europe," it's expressed intention was to help the world recover by establishing a commitment to "the four absolutes" -- love, honesty, purity, and selflessness.

In 1965, taking a cue from the power of anti-war music, J. Blanton Belk (Buchman's successor) got the idea to forward the MRA agenda with song. William Storey says "we had the energy, we had the passion, and we had the ideology, but we didn't have the vehicle, so when this musical thing came about, now we had the vehicle."

A hundred young people in coordinating outfits and matching haircuts, singing lyrics like "You can‘t live crooked and think straight... clean up the country before it‘s too late" and "Freedom isn't free! You gotta pay a price, you've gotta sacrifice, for your liberty" was quite compelling for some people. "I really think music is the power that can rearrange people's minds and hearts," says UWP songwriter Frank Fields. Another former cast member in the film, a black woman named Maggie Inge, describes resolving an altercation with a racist white man (with a shotgun) by singing the UWP song What Color is God's Skin.

UWP was funded by a host of corporations including Halliburton, General Electric, Ford, and Reader's Digest -- what Storey calls "industrial elite." MRA had established these relationships, as well as its extensive network of international political connections, prior to UWP.

Some of the members of UWP weren't initially aware of the group's MRA roots, but they eventually found out. Singers William and Linda Blackmore Cates were kicked out and shunned by the group after marrying, "because that decision was made without the blessing of Blanton Belk ," says Cates in the film. "After 6 years of friendship and service, there was never anymore more communication from anyone in the entire cast. It was such an amazing rejection."

After that she gained some perspective. "When Jonestown happened, I completely empathized with those people who followed somebody blindly because I felt like in a lot of ways that's what I did," she says in the film. Actress Glenn Close, who grew up with parents who were part of MRA, is shown in the film as teenager speaking before a crowd at an UWP event. Close gets a music credit in the film, but Storey says that she declined to participate in Smile ‘Til It Hurts because she didn't think the film went far enough in its exposure. "She calls it a cult... she wanted me to tear it apart."

Well the film is controversial enough to cause concern when Storey announced she'd be screening it at the UWP Alumni Convention in Tuscon this past weekend. Though they hadn‘t yet viewed the film, management was telling people they couldn't participate in the convention if they went to see it. The yearly alumni gathering attracts thousands of people and there has been so much interest in Smile 'Til It Hurts that Storey rented a theater and arranged for two showings. She hopes it's eye-opening and therapeutic. "There's pride and shame, it's very powerful, it carries people through a range of emotions."

Back here in LA, the film screens at 3:55 and 9:45 on  Wednesday and Thursday at the Arclight Hollywood. Go here for the entire DocuWeeks schedule. Stay tuned for LA2DAY's picks for Week 2.

Story by Chrissy Humpreys.