“IDA” 2013 | 1h22’ [PL\DK] | OTHER FAITH Cinema Screenings
Details
## Ciclo OUTRA FÉ
[OTHER FAITH Cinema Screenings]
(Curadoria de Alexandre Braga)
“IDA” 2013 | M/12 | 1h22’ [PL\DK]
De Pawel Pawlikowski
Sexta Dia 29/05 às 19h30 [Friday 05/29 at 7:30pm]
Na Polónia dos anos 1960, uma jovem noviça descobre que é judia e parte com a sua tia numa viagem para descobrir o destino da família durante o Holocausto. O percurso torna-se uma busca silenciosa por identidade e fé.
In 1960s Poland, a novice nun discovers she is Jewish and travels with her aunt to uncover the fate of her family during the Holocaust. The journey becomes a quiet search for identity and faith.
Spoken in Polish | Subtitled in English
Mais info e reservas:
More info and reservations:
https://prosacultural.org/cinema/outrafe
OTHER FAITH begins with an ancient yet ever-renewed question: what happens when religious language ceases to be merely an inherited tradition and once again becomes an inner experience? For centuries, the symbols of faith were conceived as instruments of transformation — images, gestures and narratives meant to provoke an intimate shift within the human being. Yet when these symbols harden into external structures — institutions, doctrines, inherited narratives that precede us — a risk emerges: religious storytelling may cease to be a path of revelation and instead become a script that speaks in our place.
This cycle brings together two remarkable films that explore precisely this fracture — the moment when institutional faith no longer coincides with lived truth.
In Ida (2013), by Paweł Pawlikowski, a young novice in 1960s Poland discovers, just before taking her vows, that she belongs to a Jewish family scarred by the Holocaust. The journey she undertakes with her aunt is not merely historical or familial — it is a spiritual crossing in which inherited religious identity confronts the raw complexity of the world. The film’s austere and contemplative style places faith before what no doctrine can fully contain: the truth of history, of the body, and of memory.
In First Reformed (2017), by Paul Schrader, a Protestant pastor enters a profound spiritual crisis as he confronts the ecological devastation of the contemporary world and the moral complacency of religious institutions. The diary he keeps — echoing Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest, and even resonating with the solitary introspection of Taxi Driver, which Schrader himself wrote — becomes a laboratory of the soul, where faith is tested against despair, responsibility and action. Here, belief is no longer obedience to a structure but a passage through a dark interior night where religion may either redeem or destroy.
Between these two films emerges a fragile and necessary territory: the space where religious narratives cease to function as unquestioned authority and return to their original condition — questions.
Perhaps this is precisely where another faith begins: not a faith imposed from the outside, but one that must pass through the filter of individual consciousness. A faith that does not replace us or speak in our stead, but compels us to confront the most intimate ground of our own truth.
Narratives — religious or otherwise — always carry this ambivalent power: they can illuminate the inner path, or they can become systems that colonize it.
The essential question therefore remains the same one that haunts both cinema and philosophy: how can we inhabit a narrative without ceasing to inhabit ourselves?
These two films may suggest a possible answer: not abandoning the symbolic language of faith, but rediscovering it through lived experience — where every gesture, every doubt and every silence once again belongs to the subject who lives it.
(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!