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 worlds three major monotheistic faiths and one based on a thinly veiled version of Scientology.
Outstanding among these was the Austrian director Ulrich Seidls 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 Marias 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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