The Association for Mormon Letters is delighted to present Garrett Batty with its 2025 Smith-Pettit Foundation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Mormon Letters. The award citation is given below, and a video of an interview with Garrett, done by the filmmaker Barrett Burgin, is available here. Glen will also be honored at the Association for Mormon Letters/Mormon Scholars in the Humanities Conference Awards Ceremony, May 30, 2025, at Snow College, Ephraim, Utah.
Award Citation
Garrett Batty’s career as a film director, writer, and producer stands as a testament to the power of story to inspire faith and stir the imagination. His feature films—Scout Camp (2009), The Saratov Approach (2013), Freetown (2015), Out of Liberty (2019), Faith of Angels (2024), and The Carpenter (2025)—are notable not just for their commercial flair, but for their clear commitment to portraying stories where faith and action converge. Whether plunging viewers into the perilous world of kidnapped missionaries, or the quiet resolve of a prophet trapped in the machinery of frontier justice, Batty’s use of tense pacing, crisp storytelling, and genre-blending elevates his narratives. His work consistently makes the case that simple faith isn’t the “moral of a story”—it’s the heartbeat of it.
Batty’s approach is unwavering in its embrace of Platonic idealism over Aristotelian realism. His films, often centered on communities beset by trials, do not seek to simply mirror the broken world, but to reveal the glimmers of transcendence within it, suggesting that sacred trust is not naïveté, but power. This approach aligns with, and indeed epitomizes, core Latter-day Saint doctrines that describe conviction as a catalyst for divine intervention. His films function as cinematic expressions of the principles articulated in the Doctrine & Covenants, that the Lord is “bound” to aid us, and that we can literally obtain blessings that are predicated upon faith. Like Malachi, Batty dares his viewers to “prove” God, to test whether heaven will, in fact, open its windows and pour out a blessing beyond measure. His characters do not merely hope; they act, demonstrating that in a world of shadows and setbacks, light can still break through when belief is matched by action. In a sense, Batty’s approach is Latter-day Saint Cinema embodied—the medium as the message, the shape of his stories as the signifier of identity.
By offering bold new approaches to genre, racial representation, and honest vulnerability, Batty has moved the needle in Mormon storytelling, particularly for the fellow faithful, providing a luminous template through which Latter-day Saint ideology is both depicted and enacted. The Smith-Pettit Foundation Award, aimed at mid-career artists, acknowledges Batty’s significant contributions, and looks forward to his continued artistic endeavors.
(Thank you to Barrett Burgin for writing this citation.)
Here are some more details about Garrett’s work:
Scout Camp is Boy Scout coming-of-age comedy. The Saratov Approach and Freetown are both dramas based on true stories of LDS missionaries in danger, the first set in Russia, and the second in Sierra Leone (and filmed in Ghana). Both received awards and considerable attention for taking Mormon cinema into higher quality, artistically satisfying directions. Out of Liberty is a historical drama about Joseph Smith and his companions at Liberty Jail, and the jailer that tried to protect him. Faith of Angels is based on a true story, set in Utah in 1989, of a boy trapped in a mine and miracles that occurred around his rescue. The Carpenter is a fictional story in which Jesus of Nazareth mentors a young man.
Garrett has also directed The Journey Home (2016), a documentary with Jon Voight about returning Vietnam War veterans, the Church’s Book of Mormon Video “Nephi and Lehi Testify of Jesus Christ” (2023), sequences for BYUtv sketch comedy program Studio C, and the successful “Meet the Missionaries” youtube campaign. Through his company, Three Coin Productions, Garrett has produced and directed in over 30 countries, and continues to produce and direct faith-based content for world-wide audiences.
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