Sarah’s Oil, the new faith-based film from Kingdom Story Company hitting theatres on Nov. 7, chronicles the story of a young girl, Sarah Rector, who believes there is oil underneath the path of barren land she’s allotted in Oklahoma in the early 1900s.

She displays resilience and draws strength from her family, friends and God to retain control of her land when ravenous tycoons greedily close in, and ultimately becomes one of the first female African-American millionaires.

Producer John Shepherd told The Catholic Register he was immediately drawn to Sarah’s Oil because it champions the timeless values that too few films nowadays champion.

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“(A funder) told me they don’t want to go to the movies any more because (creators) don't make the kind of films that celebrate perseverance, tenacity, faith and achieving your dreams,” said Shepherd. “I said, ‘if I could find that story,’ they said, ‘yeah, I would fund it.’ That is all a producer needs to hear, so I started digging.”

Perseverance and tenacity were traits Rector needed to draw upon in her time, and these qualities were needed on the set of Sarah’s Oil — on location in Okmulgee, Oklahoma — as “just about everything that could go wrong every day, did,” said Shepherd.

There were tornadoes and thunderstorms, insects and ticks. There were members of the production team who got sick and were infected with viral encephalitis. And there were buildings with 100-year-old elevators that would break the day a scene was scheduled for filming.

“We had to overcome adversity ourselves,” said Shepherd. “It drove us to our knees.

"Literally, it bound us together as a team. Some days there was all I could do was just blast worship music on the way to the set because we didn’t know what we were going to do.

“God demonstrated in the final film that without great sacrifice there can’t be great gain,” added the 64-year-old producer with 34 acting credits. “Anything worth something costs something.”

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Zachary Levi, who starred as Shazam! and appeared in Kingdom Story Company’s The Unbreakable Boy that debuted in February, headlines the cast as Bert Smith, Sarah’s Texas wildcat business partner, who helps the young girl discover the oil on her land. He told media outlets that his character is transformed through his friendship and professional partnership with this girl.

“As Bert says in the film, no one’s ever talked to him about his soul before,” said Levi. “No one’s ever really addressed that with him. And it resonates with him. You don’t see how much it resonates with him until toward the end of the movie, but I think that’s the major motivating factor of the growth and faith that Bert experiences through the film.”  

Naya Desir-Johnson portrays the young Sarah Rector. She said she appreciated being a girl who accomplishes all her goals without hesitation.

“When she (Sarah) believes in something, she is determined to do it,” said Desir-Johnson. “And she focuses on that one thing, and she does whatever she can to accomplish it.”

Cyrus Nowrasteh was the man in the director’s chair, and he penned his script alongside his wife, Betsy Giffen Nowrasteh. He said there is a gift in unearthing long-forgotten great historical stories.

“There’s this phenomenon of lost history — whether it’s African Americans, or Native Americans, or any culture you can think of in this melting pot — stories get lost, histories get lost,” said Cyrus. "And I thought, why should we walk away from this and allow it to also get lost?”

Giffen Nowrasteh elucidated why this story featuring a child protagonist resonates with audiences.

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“I think the thing that so appealed about this story is that she is a child,” she said. "She brings that child’s energy, that child’s hope and that uncorrupted child’s vision of things. She isn’t cynical, she isn’t skeptical. She just has a clarity of vision that adults lose.”

Four of Rector’s nieces — Donna Brown-Thompkins, Rosina Graves, Deborah Brown, and Diann Brown — were interviewed for a featurette inside Melrose Abbey in Kansas City, Missouri. Kansas City is where Rector ultimately built her life.