Commissions
Greenlit: Sacred, PBS
Sacred (1 x feature-length) – Documentary that explores religious ritual at birth, adolescence, marriage, aging and other key milestones of human life. The film is an experiment: a sweeping global film for which the director, Academy Award® winner Thomas Lennon, never once left his office in New York, instead commissioning or sourcing contributions from top international filmmakers in order to capture more than 40 diverse stories dispersed across the globe. Sweeping in its global reach, yet intensely intimate, the film is a tour de force that unifies these disparate scenes into a single work, told without narration, without experts and, for long stretches, without words at all.
At a time when religious hatreds dominate the world’s headlines, this film explores faith as primary human experience: how people turn to ritual and prayer to navigate the milestones and crises of their own lives. Opening with a young Muslim father from Cairo chanting the call to prayer to his baby who is only minutes old, the film’s approach is both lyrical and linear as it drives forward in time from the initiations of infancy (bris, baptism, and more) to coming of age ceremonies in Mandalay, Jerusalem, and the San Carlos Apache Reservation, featuring boys and girls at the cusp of adolescence. In Spain and then India, the film encounters teenagers as they lean on their faith to navigate the most intimate pressures of their lives– the strains between two parents, the prohibitions of dating. The film arcs through marriage and the trials of adulthood through to the rites—some of them solemn, others riotous and drunken—by which we remember and honor our dead.
The film’s production method leaned heavily on the Internet to manage intricate exchange across borders and cultures, combining a centralized directorial vision with far-flung, decentralized filmmaking by top filmmaking teams all across the world.
The documentary hopscotches across the globe to capture the crisis of faith triggered by the recent Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone, the stubborn determination of an ascetic in the Philippines to subject himself to pain, and the comforts that faith offers to prisoners in Angola prison in Louisiana who face life-sentences without prospect of parole. Epic and kaleidoscopic, the film journey comes to rest where it began –with the birth of a child, another life initiated into the rituals of prayer and faith.
Platform: WNET / WOWOW
Producer: WLIW LLC
TX: 2017
Source: PBS press release
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