Can you remember a time in your teenage years when you feared pleasure and joy? Can you remember someone pitching faith as a kind of sanctifying anxiety—a conditional relationship with God, contingent upon your constant worry about it? Many of us can. Many of those wounded by such fundamentalism have left religion behind. Those of us who have stayed and found better expressions for our faith still have the scabs.
Stations of the Cross picks at the scabs. The film follows fourteen-year-old Maria, a sincere young woman growing up in a restrictive Catholic sect. She sits in confirmation class, enthralled, as her priest enumerates the various pleasures that the adolescents could be giving up to God. And so Maria begins to offer her own sacrifices, one by one—winter coats, crushes, rock and roll. We know where Maria’s asceticism is taking her, but that doesn’t make the journey hurt any less.
Co-writer and director Dietrich Brüggemann lets the action unfold in fourteen painful, stationary shots—one for each station of the cross. The stark geometric compositions, cool palette, and deep focus call to mind Northern Renaissance paintings, with Maria at the center as a cautionary religious icon.
Stations of the Cross is a startling portrait of the way that fear-based faith can manipulate and torment people—especially young people—and a call to do better by the tender spirits in our flocks.—Lauren Wilford (2014)
Arts & Faith Lists:
2015 Arts & Faith Ecumenical Jury — #2