Rachel Dretzin hopes to make a second season of her Netflix docuseries Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey, which chronicles life inside of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. If she got the chance to do it, she’s interested in documenting the journey of reintegrating with society after escaping from the FLDS, which she believes is a cult.
So what are the odds of a second season?
“You have to ask Netflix that,” Rachel Dretzin told MovieMaker. But she’s definitely interested.
“There’s a lot that we did not have the time or the space to tell, and I think another piece of it that I always wished we had more time to look at is how these women and men got out and made lives for themselves and reintegrated into society, which is fascinating and unbelievable,” she said.
As Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey explains, people who leave the FLDS are generally forced to start over with no money, education, or understanding of the outside world or gentile — that is, non-FLDS — culture.
“Rebecca Musser talks a little bit about it in the series. She didn’t know what Friends was. They didn’t know who the president was,” Dretzin said. “They have to kind of enter society for the first time, often as adults, and I find that piece of the story so interesting. I wish we had more time to tell it, but there was just so much to tell. There was so much that happened. Every single person I met has a novel’s worth of stories of their own.”
One thing Dretzin hopes Keep Sweet accomplishes is raising the general public’s awareness about the FLDS.
“The fact that this not only existed but continues to exist in plain sight in 21st century America — to me, that’s something that I don’t think most people realize,” she said. “It really is astonishing, and I hope that people absorb that… this is still going on. There are lots and lots of people who still live by these rules and these guidelines and this prophet,” she added, referring to incarcerated FLDS leader Warren Jeffs.
She also wants people to see and appreciate the bravery of the women interviewed in the docuseries that successfully escaped from the FLDS and rebuilt their lives.
“The stories of these women who escaped are so inspiring. I can’t imagine a more oppressive system, and I find it so, just as a human being, so inspiring that these women found the courage and the strength to take that risk and find a life outside this cult,” she said.
If you or someone you know has left the FLDS and is in need of assistance, Rachel Dretzin recommends reaching out to Holding Out Help, an organization that helps people from polygamist cultures become self-sufficient.
Main Image: Former FLDS member Elissa Wall in Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey courtesy of Netflix
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