L.A's meanest street

Hoover Street runs through south-central Los Angeles. In daily fact and Hollywood fiction, it's a crime-ridden black enclave notorious for lethal drive-pasts, turf wars, drug busts and Rodney King-style riots. But Sophie Fiennes's documentary is not about gangstas; it's about gospellers.

If the gun rules one part of the ghetto, the weapon flourished four times on Sunday at the podium by Bishop Noel Jones (brother of the iconic Grace) keeps his own street clean of devil's contagion. In slickly packaged sermons (From Agony to Bethany, Appointment with the Anti-Christ), hot on air-punching and emphatic antithesis ("Some things must be fed, brethren, others starved"), the bespectacled bishop drives the ecstatic tempo of African-Americans locked into unreconstructed old-time religion.

A lady in his flock carries the Good Book in her handbag as naturally as her powder compact. In some ways, it is a community as self-sufficient as America's "survivalist" outposts, Weathermen and the like, eternally on their guard against such worldly evils as the FBI or the revenue men. Except that while they occasionally claim lives, Hoover Street only claims souls.

There is not a great deal of revelation in the film. No voice-over tourist guide takes us through Christmas to Easter, and the bishop isn't very upfront about finances, power politics or even album sales. But the Pentecostal flow of "inspiration" is non-stop; healing and deliverance are channelled through soul-singing, with the woes of the blues downgraded in favour of choral uplift. Fiennes's film could have done with a 15-minute cut: even soul-stirring takes its toll on the initial interest of discovering a spiritual ghetto co-existing with the better-known crime 'hood.

The UK Film Council put lottery cash on the collecting plate to co-finance the work with the BBC and Peter Greenaway's long-time Dutch patron Kees Kasander. This fits in with the council's vow to plough 20 per cent of its film-making budgets into European projects - even though the subjects may be all-American. Ecumenical, perhaps - or shrewd marketing?

Hoover Street Revival
Cert: cert15