Festival Report 2002     Seminar "Talking Faith, Talking Film" 

26th World Film Festival Montreal
22th August – 2nd September 2002

The 24th Ecumenical Jury: Christian Depoorter (Belgium), Glenn Smith (Canada), James M. Wall (USA - president), Claudette Lambert (Canada), Stephen Brown (England), Ricardo Yanez (Argentina)

The prize of the jury goes to the film:

El Último Tren/Le Dernier Train, by Diego Arsuaga, Urugay/Spain/Argentina

Through an exciting and humorous narrative, this film employs the metaphor of a train journey to reveal what happens when three older men and a young boy make a courageous decision to challenge cultural and commercial mores. The story is enhanced by its attention to generations working together to transform vulnerabilities into acts of power and love which inspire others to action.

Special mention:

Casomai, by Alessandro D'Alatri, Italy

This film demonstrates the responsibility that family, friends and working colleagues have to provide support to a  married couple. Through an innovative priest's sermon, the film uses humour to examine stereotypical images of family life that emphasis7e the essential role of  love, commitment and community in confronting those forces in society which undermine marital solidarity.

Festival Homepage

Front page news
Report by Stephen Brown, Harrogate N.Yorks (UK)

Compared to the rows between the Church and organisers of this year's Venice and San Sebastian film festivals, things could not have been more different in Montreal. The Ecumenical Jury's choice of prize-winner was front page news. Nor did it feel entirely accidental in this very French, very Catholic city that many of the films in the Competition directly engaged with church or affairs of the Spirit. This Jury comprised myself, Claudette Lambert, Glenn Smith, Ricardo Yanez, Christian Deporter and James Wall (who was our president).

In >Casomai< (to which the Ecumenical Jury gave a special mention) a young couple get married by a drop-dead gorgeous priest in a small Italian village. As he intones the vows he starts ad-libbing a few extra clauses which by their conditional nature weaken the troth they are plighting. The priest breaks off using what he has just done as sermon illustration of the statistical likelihood of this couple failing to keep their marriage vows. The film flashes forward to what might become of them, if they are not careful. Back at the wedding, the priest quizzes individual worshippers with the equivalent of what we find in Common Worship: will you the family and friends of Tomasso and Stefania do all in your power to uphold and support them in their married life together? They with one consent begin to make excuse. "In that case," he declares, "If you feel no responsibility to support this social as well as sacramental act, please clear the church and have your party". Casomai could be profitably shown to all wedding couples.

If Montreal's programmers had a preoccupation it was with parenthood, absent or otherwise. Carol's >Journey< set in the Spanish Civil War tells of  the friendship of other children, in effect orphans, that make it possible for life to continue with some degree of hope. >In Blue Car< a teenager disturbed by her parents' divorce does not have that kind of peer support. Instead a teacher turns mentor until she sees his feet of clay, learning how frail adults are. She can return to family life's imperfections, sadder but wiser. An American dysfunctional family is the focus of >Igby Goes Down<. Personally I disliked the teenage rebels even more than the shallow, hypocritical adults but younger critics at Montreal empathised with the world it described. >Father< is a German Kramer versus Kramer for the new Millennium.  Even Robert de Niro's >City by the Sea< (not in competition) was about a detective who  retired into himself after losing contact with his family, only to be reunited in alarming circumstances.

It was quite difficult to watch another German film >My First Miracle< with the murder of the two Soham children so current. Yet here was, according to the director Anne Wild, an autobiographical story of a girl and a man who go off on their own, deeply affecting one another without a hint of impropriety. A whimsical tale, >The Stone Raft<, made our jury pause for thought. The Iberian peninsula breaks off from the rest of Europe, including Gibraltar, and floats into mid-Atlantic in a voyage of self-discovery by the disparate characters who foresee what is happening. It was Buñuel but without his bite.

The Ecumenical Jury gave its prize to >The Last Train<, an Argentinean-Uruguayan co-production concerning some old railway enthusiasts hi-jacking the last working steam engine before it gets sold to Hollywood. It was easily the funniest and most touching film of the Festival. The Jury saw the metaphor of a train journey as a challenge to cultural and commercial mores where individual vulnerabilities are transformed into acts of power and love which inspire the participation of others. The most exciting thing in the Festival was the latest dance film from Carlos Saura. His flamenco-style Salomé is another apex in a brilliant career of making dance on celluloid transcend mere filmed theatre. Owing as much to Oscar Wilde's interpretation as Biblical text, there is a feast of colour, light, movement and sensuous drama which bring fresh understandings of the Baptist, Herodias' daughter and the King and Queen themselves. The film begins with a making-of-Salomé documentary which, frankly, just pads it out so it becomes a feature-length movie.
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Rev. Stephen J. Brown is an experienced adult educator and trainer in business, statutory and voluntary sectors. Alongside this he has an expertise in movies and television, frequently writing, broadcasting and teaching about them. In recent years he has been putting training and films together and pioneering exciting entertaining, effective methods by which groups and individuals deepen and acquire life and organisational skills.

Talking faith, talking film
James M. Wall

Opportunities to discuss cinema-going experiences are usually confined to friends and family. The following article describes an innovative seminar organised by ecumenical church partners and which takes place during the Montreal International Film Festival. It shows that reflecting on film can be enriching, enlightening and rewarding

When I first started reading the work of Susanne Langer, the art philosopher, I realized that she provided me with just the right methodology for understanding how religion and film can interact without doing a disservice to either. Langer suggests an important distinction in the experience of receiving works of art, a distinction she calls receiving art at two levels, the discursive and the presentational. The discursive level is what a work of art is ‘about’; the presentational level is what a film ‘is’. The viewer who approaches film from a religious perspective will be much more sensitive to the ‘isness’ of a picture because faith demands that the believer look beneath the surface in assessing life’s experiences.

Applying Langer’s distinction of discursive and presentational to the art of film has helped me in teaching and writing in this field. The methodology appears simple enough, but most viewers fail to make the distinction, remaining largely fixed on the film’s ‘aboutness’, rather than remaining open to its ‘isness’. Sadly, this is also how many religious people also view faith and doctrine, fixing on the surface data rather than its deeper significance.

This methodology enables the viewer to see beyond plot and performance of a film. When this becomes clearer, works of film art come into sharper focus for the viewer. This has certainly been the case at seminars we have conducted in connection with the Montreal World Film Festival. These seminars have brought together a select group of participants drawn from a wide variety of North American religiously oriented film goers who come to the festival to delve into the ‘isness’ of films.

These seminars, which we call Talk Faith, Talk Film, were begun by, and have continued under the direction of Interfilm, North America, an organization that seeks to deepen the understanding of film among church audience. From the beginning the seminars have involved support, as well, from the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC). Under the leadership of the Rev. Andrew Johnston, now the pastor of St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church in Ottawa, and formerly pastor of the Briarwood Presbyterian Church, in Montreal, Talk Faith, Talk Film, has energized and informed film viewers since its first sessions in 1997. The seminar is held at St. James Church, an historic Protestant church located in downtown Montreal within walking distance of the main venues showing festival films.

Discussing world cinema
That proximity to the theatres, as well as to modest-priced hotels and even more modest priced religious housing facilities, makes it possible for Talk Faith, Talk Film, to offer a tightly scheduled four-day weekend event on the first weekend of the festival for pastors and lay people who want to experience and discuss current world cinema from the perspective of the Christian faith.

The festival itself runs for ten days, beginning with the last weekend of August and ending on the first Monday of September. It is a festival that focuses less on commercial products and more on lesser known works from a wide variety of countries. It is a competitive festival, with several juries that select the best of the festival, including an ecumenical jury of three Protestant and three Catholic film scholars and film buffs.

Talk Faith, Talk Film opens on the first Friday of the festival with an afternoon lecture and reception, and a commissioning service for the ecumenical jury, held in the sanctuary of St. James Church. For the next three mornings, Saturday through Monday, seminar participants see two films each morning that are in competition for the various prizes awarded by festival juries. The seminar fee covers these tickets, which are for the six films scheduled for those three mornings. Since the festival schedule is not finalized until a few days before opening night, seminar participants do not until they arrive which films they will see; they only know they will be exposed to a wide variety of works of film art from different countries.

After the morning screenings, seminar members meet over lunch at St. James for a guided discussion of the morning’s pictures. These discussions are led by a designated leader. That leader in 2002 was Dr. Patsy Kendall, a psychologist from South Carolina. Dr. Kendall is a graduate of the Talk Faith, Talk Film seminar, who had attended two previous seminars, and later served as a member of the 2001 ecumenical jury. (One of the benefits of the seminar is that it enables Interfilm North America to identify future jury appointees for the Montreal and other world film festivals.)

Developing deeper awareness
As president of Interfilm North America, I have led several of these seminar discussions and I still find that the discussion of a work of film art with an informed church audience is a deeply rewarding experience. I believe that film viewing is essentially a meeting of two biographies, the life experience of the film maker, made manifest through the work at hand, and the life experience of the individual viewer. Through the discussion after each morning’s pair of films, participants develop a deeper film awareness, an experience which both enhances their own film sensibility and helps them develop their own leadership skills to train others in film awareness.
Our own personal life experiences -- our biographies -- are enriched when we hear how others react to a film, or when we obtain new information that we missed in our own viewing. We will all have seen the same film; but often discussions reveal that we didn’t really ‘see’ every part of the film, nor did we grasp the same theological insight that others saw. When the viewers are from different parts of North America, differing religious traditions, and from widely different age groups, the theological conversation becomes intense and often contentious. But that is what art does: bring us into a deeper awareness of ourselves and into a deeper understanding of the vision of the artist.

This Montreal seminar has become so successful -- some applicants had to be turned away in 2002 to keep the group from getting too large -- that it can now serve as a model for other festivals. Montreal, of course, is not easy to duplicate. It has many advantages that will not always be found in other places. For example, there is the location, within easy walking distance, of the church to the theatres where morning screenings are held. Montreal also has the advantage of many years of evolving good relations between Protestant and Catholic church leaders and festival officials.
Over the years, Montreal festival officials have become very receptive to the ecumenical community’s involvement in the festival. The festival provides passes to all festival films for ecumenical jury members, meeting rooms for jury deliberations, and includes a page in the annual festival programme book identifying members of the ecumenical jury. In addition, festival officials help the seminar to secure tickets for the six morning films for discussion, and schedule a final press conference where the ecumenical awards are announced, often with the winning director in attendance.

But even without this initial strong bond between the festival and local churches, Talk Faith and Talk Film can still be duplicated at other festivals. One example is at the St. Louis, Missouri, festival where a seminar and jury programme was begun by a pastor who had attended an earlier Montreal seminar. At the Denver Film Festival, Interfilm North America participates in the annual selection of the Krystof Kieslowski award to the outstanding European film at the festival. Kieslowski, the late and most certainly, great, Polish film director, who is considered to be a film maker with a strong religious sensibility, is honoured through this award, which is presented by the festival in cooperation with American representatives of the Polish government.
In addition to Kieslowski, whose Decalogue series is a prime example of how a film maker is able to resonate with theological material, the Montreal festival has been instrumental in introducing to North American audiences the films of Majid Majidi, the iranian director. Majidi is the director of such sensitive works involving children as Baran, Children of Heaven, and The Color of Paradise.

Talk Faith, Talk Film is a seminar model which can be duplicated wherever church members gather to view and discuss films. It helps if there is a local film festival around which the seminar could be organized. But even if there is no festival nearby, a church could create its own mini-festival over a weekend or periodically over a longer time span. In my church, for example, we screened each of the ten films in Kieslowski's Decalogue once a month for ten months. The participants in the monthly discussions were so involved in the religious sensibility clearly evident in Kieslowski’s work that they set up additional screenings for Kieslowski’s trilogy, Three Colors: Blue, White and Red.

The key to developing church audiences that are sensitive to the deeper religious significance of film lies in directed film discussions of films of artistic merit. The ‘isness’ of a film will reveal the level of theological insight -- or the lack of such insight- - as viewers reflect not only on the work at hand, but do so from within the context of a body of work, both of the film maker whose work is being examined, and also of the larger body of work of film makers whose work has proven to be so rich in religious insights.

Talking faith and talking film, when the two are done in tandem, can be an enriching and enlightening experience for any church group, whether in connection with an established festival like the Montreal World Film Festival, or in a series established by a local congregation.

James M. Wall is INTERFILM president of North America, is senior contributing editor of Christian Century magazine, located in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He teaches at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He has worked on several books specifically devoted to the topic of relating theology to film: Church and Cinema (Eerdmans, 1971) and Three European Dictators (Eerdmans, 1972) and Image and Likeness: Religious Visions in American Film Classics (Paulist Press, 1992).

(c) Media Development, Issue 1, 2003

Other links:
http://www.christiancentury.org