Conversas com Cinema© Screenings PROSA (with film-debate)

Spoken in English | Subtitled in Portuguese
IMDB
Trailer

Mais info e reservas:
More info and reservations:
https://prosacultural.org/cinema/inthenameofgod

There are perhaps few words that have been spoken with as much hope — and, at the same time, with as much violence — as the word God.
Throughout history, His name has been invoked to comfort, to bring people together and to give meaning to human experience, but also to legitimise conquest, impose behaviour, silence difference and justify acts that would otherwise struggle to find any moral foundation outside an authority considered absolute. When someone claims to act in the name of God, the word ceases to describe only a relationship with the transcendent: it can become an instrument of power.

The IN THE NAME OF GOD cycle begins with this unease, bringing together two deeply physical and violent films in which faith, authority, guilt and desire become entangled. The intention is not to put God on trial, but to observe what human beings are capable of doing when they believe — or claim — that they have the right to speak in His name.

In THE DEVIL ALL THE TIME (2020), by António Campos, we enter a rural America marked by generations of trauma, war, poverty and religious fervour. Preachers, fathers and figures of authority repeatedly invoke faith while violence permeates family and community life. In this world, religion can emerge from human despair in the face of death, but it can also become a language of manipulation, abuse and justification for the intolerable. At the centre of it all is Arvin, a young man who inherits violence without entirely inheriting belief, and who must discover whether it is possible to escape the moral cycle constructed by those who came before him.

Although their stories are separated by more than a century, the two films converge upon the same question: what happens when the conviction that one possesses the truth removes the need to understand the other. Perhaps the age in which certain forms of religious authority could present themselves so openly and unquestioningly belongs to the past. But it would be naïve to believe that the mechanism exposed by these films has disappeared. It remains wherever an absolute truth is used to suspend doubt, legitimise power, or transform the other into someone who must be converted, corrected, subdued or eliminated.

IN THE NAME OF GOD therefore proposes a reflection less on faith itself than on its instrumentalisation. Perhaps God is not necessarily to be found in the voice of those who proclaim Him the loudest, nor in the certainty of those who claim to know His will. Perhaps He may be found precisely in the opposite place: in small things, in silent attention to the other, in vulnerability, in care, in our capacity to acknowledge what we do not understand. And perhaps He may also be found in doubt itself — not as the absence of faith, but as the human awareness that no word can ever fully possess that which it seeks to name.
For there is a fundamental distance between seeking God and speaking in the name of God. The first may require us to remain before the mystery, accepting doubt and otherness; the second may grant us the dangerous certainty that we already possess the answer. Perhaps it is precisely within that distance — between the humility of seeking and the violence of asserting — that these two films invite us to remain.

(Curatorship by Alexandre Braga)

All Cinema PROSA films will be shown on an illuminated pixel (65’’ QLED screen) in a room with a maximum capacity of 24 spectators.

Come and have a glass of wine or a non-alcoholic drink in the cinema room with us!

Spoken in Danish | Subtitled in English
IMDB
Trailer

Mais info e reservas:
More info and reservations:
https://prosacultural.org/cinema/inthenameofgod

There are perhaps few words that have been spoken with as much hope — and, at the same time, with as much violence — as the word God.
Throughout history, His name has been invoked to comfort, to bring people together and to give meaning to human experience, but also to legitimise conquest, impose behaviour, silence difference and justify acts that would otherwise struggle to find any moral foundation outside an authority considered absolute. When someone claims to act in the name of God, the word ceases to describe only a relationship with the transcendent: it can become an instrument of power.

The IN THE NAME OF GOD cycle begins with this unease, bringing together two deeply physical and violent films in which faith, authority, guilt and desire become entangled. The intention is not to put God on trial, but to observe what human beings are capable of doing when they believe — or claim — that they have the right to speak in His name.

In GODLAND (2022), by Hlynur Pálmason, the question shifts to the late nineteenth century. Lucas, a young Danish priest, crosses the brutal Icelandic landscape with a mission to build a church and carry the word of God into a remote territory. Yet the more he attempts to inscribe his faith, his language and his authority upon that land, the more the landscape itself seems to resist him. His religious mission gradually becomes entangled with another form of power: that of a Denmark seeking to impose cultural and spiritual order upon a land it politically controls. Little by little, the missionary’s certainty gives way to arrogance, isolation and violence.

Although their stories are separated by more than a century, the two films converge upon the same question: what happens when the conviction that one possesses the truth removes the need to understand the other. Perhaps the age in which certain forms of religious authority could present themselves so openly and unquestioningly belongs to the past. But it would be naïve to believe that the mechanism exposed by these films has disappeared. It remains wherever an absolute truth is used to suspend doubt, legitimise power, or transform the other into someone who must be converted, corrected, subdued or eliminated.

IN THE NAME OF GOD therefore proposes a reflection less on faith itself than on its instrumentalisation. Perhaps God is not necessarily to be found in the voice of those who proclaim Him the loudest, nor in the certainty of those who claim to know His will. Perhaps He may be found precisely in the opposite place: in small things, in silent attention to the other, in vulnerability, in care, in our capacity to acknowledge what we do not understand. And perhaps He may also be found in doubt itself — not as the absence of faith, but as the human awareness that no word can ever fully possess that which it seeks to name.
For there is a fundamental distance between seeking God and speaking in the name of God. The first may require us to remain before the mystery, accepting doubt and otherness; the second may grant us the dangerous certainty that we already possess the answer. Perhaps it is precisely within that distance — between the humility of seeking and the violence of asserting — that these two films invite us to remain.

(Curatorship by Alexandre Braga)

All Cinema PROSA films will be shown on an illuminated pixel (65’’ QLED screen) in a room with a maximum capacity of 24 spectators.

Come and have a glass of wine or a non-alcoholic drink in the cinema room with us!