Sacred Succor
By FT Correspondent
Oscar winning documentarian, Thomas Lennon’s latest short film, Sacred, is an understated documentary with a globe-spanning exploration of faith and religion. Premiered at Fuji films this week, the film is a compilation of the work of 40 filmmakers from all over the world in two years and is more pleasant than punchy.
Although religion tends to make headlines for the worst reasons today, the movie ambitiously captured the everyday lives of people from a wide array of beliefs, like a baptism in Ethiopia, a man’s pilgrimage to Ukraine, a Haitian woman’s visit to a waterfall said to aid in fertility, to stress how religion is primarily about small but significant moments of hope, affirmation, and reflection.
This well-intentioned endeavor against fear and prejudice for organized faith among secular liberals or adherents of any religion has no single narrator. Its aim to prove that commonalities of individual devotional experience across varied cultures, faith and geography is more fundamental than their differences is achieved by showing such diversity and one’s relation to their faith.
While the movie is clearly designed more to celebrate than to critique, its ambivalent segments were more memorable like the inmates from Angola Prison in Louisiana desirous of earthly rewards and a mango seller from Africa who was surrounded by believers but had lost faith when her family died.
The movie isn’t focused on the problems created by pathological following of religion and making large political statements but on the relief and aid religion provides and the sense of community, family, and selfhood it promotes from birth to death.
