For many years now I have put a question on the final exam in various religion courses that asks students to apply ideas from the course to a short film screened during the exam. This is a film we have not watched or discussed before, so it is essentially new data for the class. In this article I discuss some of the challenges I encountered when I began using short films in exams and how I resolved them. I also discuss the many advantages of this approach, some of which I had anticipated (or at least hoped for), while others surprised me. These surprises include congruencies between using short films in exams and principles of trauma-informed pedagogy. The article includes specific examples from three courses of exam questions and films, and answers that three students provided.