"I told him that many of those encounters had certainly been filmed by the Vatican cameras, and that there he would find a veritable gold mine of stories that told a story," Ruffini said.
Afineevsky found them: the refugees Francis met with on some of his foreign trips, prisoners he blessed, and some of the gay people to whom he has ministered. "I told him it wasn't going to be easy," he said.īut Ruffini gave him some advice: names of people who had been impacted by the pope, even after just a brief meeting. Ruffini said that when Afineevsky first approached him about a documentary, he tried to tamp down his hopes for interviewing the pope. "The film tells the story of the pope by reversing the cameras," said Vatican communications director Paolo Ruffini, who was one of Afineevsky's closest Vatican-based collaborators on the film. "Francesco," is more a visual survey of the world's crises and tragedies, with audio from the pope providing possible ways to solve them.Īfineevsky, who was nominated for an Oscar for his 2015 documentary "Winter on Fire: Ukraine's Fight for Freedom," traveled the world to film his pope movie: The settings include Cox's Bazaar in Bangladesh where Myanmar's Rohingya sought refuge the U.S.-Mexico border and Francis' native Argentina. Wim Wenders did that in the 2018 film " Pope Francis: A Man of His Word," which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. On Wednesday, Afineevsky's 48th birthday, the director said Francis presented him with a birthday cake during a private meeting at the Vatican.īut "Francesco" is more than a biopic about the pope. The two recently exchanged Yom Kippur greetings Afineevsky is a Russian-born Jew now based in Los Angeles.
#PONTIFF SOULVER MOVIE#
The director worked official and unofficial channels starting in early 2018 and ended up so close to Francis by the end of the project that he showed the pope the movie on his iPad in August. "Listen, when you are in the Vatican, the only way to achieve something is to break the rule and then to say, 'I'm sorry,'" Afineevsky said in an interview ahead of the premiere. He said he negotiated his way in through persistence and deliveries of Argentine mate tea and Alfajores cookies that he got to the pope via some well-connected Argentines in Rome. Cruz tells his own story in snippets throughout the film, chronicling both Francis' evolution on understanding sexual abuse as well as to document the pope's views on gay people.ĭirector Evgeny Afineevsky had remarkable access to cardinals, the Vatican television archives and the pope himself. One of the main characters in the documentary is Juan Carlos Cruz, the Chilean survivor of clergy sexual abuse whom Francis initially discredited during a 2018 visit to Chile.Ĭruz, who is gay, said that during his first meetings with the pope in May 2018 after they patched things up, Francis assured him that God made Cruz gay. "We have to remember that there are places all around the world where to be gay is to be thrown out of your family, where it's to be beaten, where to be trans is to take your life in your hands, and so the pope's statements, I think, will have an important effect and need to be celebrated that way." "What the pope has done today in these comments is he's given a permission slip to Catholics and to Catholic leaders who want to take that extra step, who want to be pastoral, as he's been, in affirming LGBT people and their families and their loves, and that's no small thing," Hornbeck said.
Patrick Hornbeck, a professor of theology at Fordham University, said on CBSN that he didn't expect to see church teaching change anytime soon because of Francis' endorsement of civil unions. Catholic Church teaching holds that gay people must be treated with dignity and respect but that homosexual acts are "intrinsically disordered." A 2003 document from the Vatican's doctrine office stated that the church's respect for gay people "cannot lead in any way to approval of homosexual behavior or to legal recognition of homosexual unions." That document was signed by the then-prefect of the office, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI and Francis' predecessor.
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