Joy Unspeakable is a 1981 documentary that was produced by Indiana University Folklore Institute researchers and film crews from IU's Radio & Television Services. Examining the spiritual lives of Pentecostals living in Bloomington—especially women—the ethnographic film earned academic and public accolades. It also represented an early success in the research career of Elaine Lawless, an esteemed folklorist whose 1988 book God's Peculiar People: Women's Voice & Folk Tradition in a Pentecostal Church undertook a broader exploration of southern Indiana Pentecostalism based partly on the materials gathered in this project.

Ethnographic film is a genre that privileges the perspectives and experiences of filmic subjects. Joy Unspeakable reflects this by allowing its subjects to explain, at length, their orientations toward Pentecostalism, and by including long, uninterrupted scenes of worship meetings. Voiceover narration is minimal. While folklorists do not claim sole proprietorship of ethnographic film, they are particularly suited to produce it because of the nature of their training. Ethnography is a typical research method in folklore studies, though academic books and articles are its more common products.

Joy Unspeakable is among the most well-known ethnographic films produced by folklorists. Along with Elizabeth "Betsy" Peterson, Lawless used the film to increase awareness of the female experience in a religion that is sometimes stereotyped as restricting women's freedoms. What is more, Lawless and Peterson hosted numerous public screenings of the film—some of which included people who appeared in it—as a way of fostering public dialogue about religious and gender issues.