Faith Takes Center Stage In ‘The Innocents’

[gracepoole]

I’m looking forward to seeing this film whenever it becomes available near me. I’ve placed in bold the quote from it that really stands out to me.

The Innocents is an extraordinary new film from acclaimed French director Anne Fontaine. In Polish and French, it tells the true story of a young French Red Cross doctor, Mathilde (Lou de Laâge) in Warsaw after World War II. She is caring for French survivors of the Nazi camps when she agrees, reluctantly, to respond to an emergency at a Benedictine convent. What she finds is shocking.

Soviet soldiers had rampaged through the convent, repeatedly raping scores of the nuns over three days of unspeakable horror. Some of the sisters became pregnant. The Mother Abbess, played with steely self-righteousness by Agata Kulesza, insists the pregnancies be kept secret. She swears the young doctor to secrecy, too.

…]

As for the sisters, they keep on with their lives, praying and chanting together, the peace of those moments a respite for them, for Mathilde who looks on, and for us. But faith has been a threatened casualty of the trauma. Most articulate about the struggle to hold on to faith in the face of pure evil is Sister Maria (Agata Buzek), Mother Abbess’s right-hand woman and the heart of the film.

Sister Maria confesses to Mathilde that she is unable to find consolation, that she relives those nights over and over. Still, she doesn’t see her faith crisis as unique. “At first you’re like a child,” she explains, “holding your father’s hand, feeling safe. But then the time comes—and it always comes—when your father lets go and you’re lost, alone in the dark. You cry out and no one answers. Even if you prepare, it catches you unawares. It hits you right in the heart.” Despite her travails, Sister Maria emerges with the strength to get the sisters to the other side. **“Faith is 24 hours of doubt and one minute of hope,” **she says. She’s willing to go with the hope.

The film lays bare how ruthlessly women raped in wartime are judged. It is because of the inevitable consequences of those judgments that Mother Abbess and Sister Maria keep the secret. If the new communist government were to learn of the pregnancies, they fear, the convent would be shut down, leaving the nuns rejected by their communities, thrown out their homes, objects of shame. “Many,” says Mother Abbess, “would die.”

huffingtonpost.com/angela-bonavoglia/faith-takes-center-stage-_b_10718038.html

Here’s the trailer, too: youtube.com/watch?v=Go63ZVVwivI

 

[Exiled_Child]

It sounds like an extremely disturbing film, but I’m going to make an effort to watch it, too, whenever it comes out. Thanks for the review.

I’ve always wondered to what degree these kinds of stories are pure atrocity propaganda, and to what degree they’re actually incredibly downplayed, and suppressed even. It doesn’t seem to be a subject that’s really talked about. I’m thinking primarily of the Russian Revolution, and the gory history of Christian persecution during that era.