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cbayer

(146,218 posts)
Tue Sep 4, 2012, 11:50 AM Sep 2012

Religion: Back With a Vengeance at Venice Festival

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/05/arts/05iht-venice05.html?_r=1

By RODERICK CONWAY MORRIS
Published: September 4, 2012

VENICE — Religion roars onto the screen as a subject for both mainstream and avant-garde filmmakers this season— a fact reflected in and out of competition during the first days of the Venice International Film Festival, which prominently featured dramas stimulated by the world’s three major monotheistic faiths and one based on a thinly veiled version of Scientology.

Outstanding among these was the Austrian director Ulrich Seidl’s in-competition “Paradies: Glaube” (Paradise: Faith). This is the second part of his “Paradise Trilogy,” the first of which was about a woman who goes in search of love as a sex tourist in Kenya.

“Glaube” focuses on her sister, Anna Maria, played by Maria Hofstätter, who after the failure of her marriage to a Muslim immigrant, has taken up an extreme form of Catholicism, constantly praying, mortifying her flesh by scourging herself and shuffling around her apartment on her knees until they bleed. She spends the rest of her spare time going from door to door with a plaster cast of the Virgin Mary, trying to persuade people to abjure sin and adopt a rigorous form of Christianity and to save them from damnation.

But Anna Maria’s routine is disrupted when her errant husband, Nabil (Nabil Saleh), returns, now wheelchair-bound and expecting his estranged wife to care for him and even to provide what he sees as her conjugal sexual duties.

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Religion: Back With a Vengeance at Venice Festival (Original Post) cbayer Sep 2012 OP
It sounds like a lot of religious themes; but based on the descriptions ... Jim__ Sep 2012 #1

Jim__

(14,045 posts)
1. It sounds like a lot of religious themes; but based on the descriptions ...
Tue Sep 4, 2012, 03:51 PM
Sep 2012

... these may be more of a contrast of extreme religious life styles with "ordinary" life.

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