About Us
ARCADIA FILMS is an independent film producer of documentaries, docudramas, movies for broadcast television and theatrical distribution.
The company was established by the father son team of Richard and Stephen Payne.
More about Richard Payne
More about Stephen Payne
ARCADIA FILMS projects are co-produced and co-directed by Richard and Stephen Payne, a father/son team.
Richard Payne
President, Producer & Co-founder
Born in Ottawa, Canada, after post graduate studies in Philosophy, Theology and Religious Education, he was a school supervisor and a freelance television, radio and film writer/researcher for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and the National Film Board of Canada. Moving to the U.S.A. in 1967, he became an editor and publisher. He conceived and developed as founding Editor-in-Chief the 130-volume The Classics Of Western Spirituality (Paulist Press), a library of new modern English translations of the great books of the Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Christian, Jewish, Islamic and Native American traditions. He conceived and developed the 25-volume World Spirituality: An Encyclopedic History of the Religious Quest (Crossroad Publishing), a comprehensive study of the world's religions. He also conceived and developed a 60-volume series The Classics Of Eastern Spirituality. Richard was Associate Editor of the Paulist Press, and of the monthly journal New Catholic World, Associate Publisher of Crossroad Publishing, and Founder and Publisher of Amity House. He has been consultant for a variety of publishers and a leader in interfaith dialogue as President of The Conference of the World's Religions, and Executive Director of The Assembly of the World's Religions. Since co-founding Arcadia Films with his son Stephen in 1991, they have co-produced and directed together over 120 films together. He and his wife Patricia have had five children in their 48 years of marriage. They live in the Litchfield Hills region of Connecticut.
ARCADIA FILMS projects are co-produced and co-directed by Richard and Stephen Payne, a father/son team.
Stephen Payne
Vice President, Producer & Co-founder
Born in Ottawa, Canada, Stephen was raised in the United States. After studying the art and science of filmmaking at York University in Toronto, he entered the film and television industry, first in New York then Hollywood and Toronto. Through a wide range of production and post-production roles, Stephen gained a remarkable reputation for his "hands-on technical expertise." He was an assistant director of features, and a post-production coordinator for Power Pictures and the USA Television Network. He was a member of the production team of Canada's two great internationally acclaimed film directors - the 1998 Oscar nominated Atom Egoyan, and the 1989 Oscar nominated Denys Arcand. In 1991, he and his father Richard founded Arcadia Films and has since co-produced, directed and edited over 120 films. As an accomplished cinematographer, he was Director of Photography on a number of projects. Also a musician, he has composed the theme music to some of their films. Stephen is President of Arcadia Films Canada Ltd. (AFC) which is working to extend the Arcadia brand to Catholics world-wide. Through cutting-edge projects coupled with powerful grassroots/Internet marketing and distribution, AFC seeks to change the way traditional religious films are made and delivered to believers over a new digital landscape.
What's in the name "Arcadia"?
Arcadia was the original name given America by its first French Catholic explorers and settlers. Ironically, Samuel de Champlain later misspelled the name - making it Acadia.
The meaning of the name Arcadia stands in the living Catholic tradition of St. Augustine's City of God, St. Thomas More's Utopia and Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. It's a symbol of the Church's call to a culture of personal unity and diversity that discovers the true gifts of life and love through faith - in Christ's Mystical Body, the Church.
The name is also a perennial warning of the deadly consequences of the false salvation held out to us by godless "utopian" ideologies. Direct descendents of these French pioneers, the founders of Arcadia Films seek to live out the love, truth and beauty of their Catholic faith by creating film and television in a new era of discovery - on the small screen, the big screen, and in cyberspace. More...
WHAT'S IN THE NAME ARCADIA?
Arcadia was the first name given to America in the "Age of Discovery".
In 1524, the King of France's explorer Verrazano, inspired by the "beauty of the trees" along the North Carolina coast, gave it this name.
It evoked the memory of Virgil's idyllic pastoral land, which the classical Greek poet idealized in his Ecologues. But above all it contained a historic warning of the pantheistic dangers that lurked within Virgil's utopian "spiritual landscape".
For Verrazano drew the name directly from hugely popular prose poem of his time entitled Arcadia, written by the Italian Jacopo Sannazaro (1458-1530). Known as "the Christian Virgil", Sannazaro like Dante and Petrarch before him, was a Christian humanist.
His works warn secular humanists of the increasing threat of Gnostic utopianism. Sannazaro unmasked the growing erosion by among the educated elites of Europe of their "sense of the supernatural" caused by the movements of neo-pagan romanticism.
Using the skull image and the Latin phrase "et in Arcadia ego" (even in Arcadia I am), Sannazaro demonstrated that even in the most idyllic human situation "death" was a reality that brings one face to face with the question of the afterlife.
The poet recognized that within Europe's romantic return to the classical cultures of Greece and Rome - there was a utopian denial of death; and that it was inherently a primal denial of life - both human and eternal.
WHAT'S IN THE NAME ARCADIA? (Continued)
Sannazaro saw that a Utopian vision appeared to be paradise to the common man.
But he realized that in such abstract paradises of the mind, people would inevitably experience both a profound lack of respect for human life and a crushing poverty.
Sannazaro's patron Pope Clement VII praised especially his poem On the Virgin's Childbearing.
In it Mary is the embodiment of the Church; and of a culture reborn in freedom through the sacrificial spirit of her Magnificat's "fiat".
Clement VII sent New France its first Catholic priests - the Franciscan Recollets. A new order freshly restored and renewed in the founding grace of St. Francis of Assisi.
Adding a touch of irony, Arcadia became Acadia when Champlain mistakenly dropped the "r" from the word.
Despite both the Acadian expulsion...
And the French defeat on the Plains of Abraham at the hands of the English...
WHAT'S IN THE NAME ARCADIA? (Continued)
Arcadia remains like St. Joan of Arc, a tragic symbol of our culture's growing loss of faith and innocence and of another "American exceptionalism"...
One to be found universally in the Mystical Body of Christ, the Catholic Church,...
And particularly through the French spirituality that is America's forgotten grace.
Arcadia points away from the false salvations of utopian ideologies like socialism.
It points directly to the perennial wisdom of Christ's cross in Augustine's City of God...
In Thomas More's Utopia...
And today in convert Evelyn Waugh's use of Arcadia in subtitle of his first Catholic novel Brideshead Revisited...
To remind us that we're not saved by ideas but by God.
WHAT'S IN THE NAME ARCADIA? (Continued)
Arcadia Films was founded by direct descendents of those early French Catholic pioneers.
Their patron saints are St. Francis Assisi and St. Louis de Montfort who inspired New France.
Today, we settled in the woods of northwestern Connecticut but connected electronically by digital communications to the cyberspace world of virtual reality.
We seek to serve others in the words of Pope Benedict XVI in "an appropriate environment, a kind of 'eco-system' that maintains a just equilibrium between silence, words, images and sounds."
We do so in the midst of a culture experiencing a "grand derangement" not unlike the Acadian expulsion.
Thus as the seed of the old world dies and is being transformed into a new springtime...
Through Mary we say with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's Evangeline:
"All was ended now, the hope and the fear, and the sorrow,
All the aching of heart, the restless, unsatisfied longing,
All the dull, deep pain and constant anguish of patience!
And as she pressed once more the lifeless head to her bosom,
Meekly she bowed her own, and muttered, "Father, I thank Thee!"
Our Vision
We were privileged to have a private audience with Blessed Pope John Paul II and presented him with some copies of our work. It was the day he published his Letter to Artists and he presented us with personal copies. Its closing words have inspired us since then: "May your art help to affirm that true beauty which, as a glimmer of the Spirit of God, will transfigure matter, opening the human soul to a sense of the eternal."
Arcadia Films seeks to serve that vision in the Spirit of Christ's final mandate: "Go, therefore, make disciples of all nations; baptise them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teach them to observe all the commands I give you. And know that I am with you always; yes, to the end of time" (Mt 28:19-20). We seek to do so by the grace of God's Mother Mary, with whom we are all called to say: "My soul magifies the Lord, and my spirit has rejoiced in God my savior" (Luke 1:47).