Sister of Ralph and Joseph, Sophie Fiennes' first film was "Lars From 1-10" (1998), a ten-minute documentary about the Danish Dogme 95 film movement. She's now making her feature length debut with "Hoover Street Revival", a documentary about the church of Los Angeles preacher Bishop Noel Jones (brother of Grace Jones) and his attempts to help the ghetto community of South Central.

What's so important about the work Bishop Jones does?

Noel Jones is like a father figure, because he's giving people the parental authority they didn't have as children. He's trying to give them some kind of framework in a situation where so much has disintegrated.

The film doesn't cast judgement on any of the action. Was that deliberate?

I tried to make as thin a veil between the subject and the audience as possible. I'm just the translator, the midwife of a reality. I've constructed it in a way that lets me show lots of things that I think are very rich, exciting and challenging. I have my own response, but the material speaks for itself.

It's also quite a spiritual film...

The real challenge is if people watching the film realise that what he's preaching is just as relevant to them as to anybody. That makes the audience part of the church community as the physical space of the cinema mirrors that of the church. So in a certain sense you're sitting in a pew when you're sitting in the cinema aisle.

Was filming in the ghetto dangerous?

I always had Miss Jessie with me. She's an ex-prostitute and very bright and she's got 'street smarts'. She helped me read what was going on around me. But the one-dimensional vision of South Central that comes through the media is totally lame. One of the things that amazed me was that virtually everybody wanted to be prayed for. We'd be standing with people who you might have thought were going to steal your camera or something, and the next thing you'd be praying with them that they'd be able to get the car back from the authorities who'd taken it away.

Life on the streets looked pretty harsh...

Every single person living in that community has had something happen to them that was damaging. I had to hold back on that in the film, because it was so bad people just wouldn't want to know. Yet, while there may be financial poverty, but there's also an incredible richness. What's really amazing about that church is that Jones brings in the superstars from Beverly Hills. People come down to the ghetto from these other very rich places, people like Puff Daddy, Mr T from the A-Team, Chris Tucker, black recording artists and black TV stars. It makes the church becomes a really exciting place in the community.