What were the existential and absolute quiries that many of us begun to pose ourselves between puberty and adolescencehoping for final answers from our teachers, parents, priests or older brothers?
The documentary is based on an idea which is both very simple, but at the same time quite complex: it poses extremely direct questions to a large and diverse group of people regarding their own intimate relationships with God, spirituality, and faith. One of the questions is, “Who is God for you?” A question simultaneously banal and very difficult for which the response could not only take hours but for some is a lifelong quest. In this case, the idea and the experiment are to demand nippy responses that are immediate and devoid of superstructures. The Directors utilize the apparent limits of an extemporaneous interview as a means for reaching brief moments of truth and sincerity. The foundation of the documentary is given by the vast heterogeneity of the human beings interviewed, each with its different, culture, religion, social and geographical background. The fact that this group of people all worked on a set of a film about the passion of Jesus Christ provided for a far more attentive and profound answers.
That which one wishes to gain is a vast, extreme, delicate, rational but poetic, inflexible and hazy, range of differences in personal spiritual experience. This documentary speaks of one of the very few aspects of life that touches every human being, atheist, agnostic, mystic or those who have either not defined their creed or do not wish to go there.
The intention is that the vision of this documentary can interest anyone and capture the attention of the viewer, and that one will be touched profoundly, but can also have be entratained. There are very moving and inspiring moments, but also testimonies that are striking and fun in their immediacy and ingenuity.
The direction of the interviews is simple, as well as rigorous and painstakingly photographed like large-format Polaroids. The testimonies are sewed with decontextualized images of a white dog wondering among the Sassi and of the prehistoric churches of Matera in southern Italy. These places are depicted in a somewhat destructuralized manner, surreal and oneiric along with an original soundtrack especially composed to build a purely narrative and aesthetic textile.
Work on the documentary took nearly a year and a half, from shooting to editing and music recording. The original music score was composed by orchestra director Alessandro Molinari and by musicians from Italy, Mongolia, India and Honduras. Amongst these are Kamal Sabri, Enk Jarghal, Khaoticos and Maurizio Iorio.
The inspiring film for this project has been Pier Paolo Pasolini’s ‘Comizi d’amore’.