Overview
Its inspiration is a primal confrontation with our species’ unique ability to have faith — sparked by my mother’s question, "My son, why do you no longer believe in God?" Handling that conversation compassionately, without diminishing her beliefs while conveying myself honestly, seemed a contradiction. The main character reckons with organized religion, believing God is larger than one sect: the origin of biodiversity.
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Reflection
There is a growing lack of faith among my academic peers, many of whom associate being faithful with being uneducated. Stories about the diversity of individual belief, and the moral conflicts it evokes, pull me in. The disagreement runs through my own family: I was baptized twice, in a Catholic and a Lutheran church.
The film borrows the vocabulary of justice, the legal language we use to define how to act, to connect the divine system with the words we see the world through. Playing both the guilty and the judge, I say: "I fear my ability to be unjust. And I fear my inability to love those who do injustice."
Home with my parents for the first long stretch in eight years, and short on actors, I convinced my mother to be in the film, and wrote it so she never had to speak a line. I never wrote "Mama, forgive me, I do not believe in heaven." It came while improvising as an actor, and it taught me, as a director, to give in to the truth.