A golden age for films about Christianity
We live in a golden age of films about religious belief, declared Philip Jenkins in The Christian Century. “A survey of just the past decade reveals multiple presentations that would have to be included in any list of the greatest films ever made about Christianity or on Christian themes,” he wrote, suggesting that increased secularisation in advanced countries has perhaps added to filmmakers’ intrigue in faith.
Notable examples include Of Gods and Men (2010), from France, the champion of secularism, about the heroic monks martyred by jihadis in Algeria. Other examples are The Innocents (2016), also French, which depicts a Polish convent in the aftermath of World War II after many of the nuns have been raped by Soviet soldiers; the Polish film Ida (2013), about a nun discovering her lost Jewish identity; as well as Martin Scorsese’s Silence (2016), about Jesuit martyrs in Japan.
