Pope gets an unprecedented close-up, courtesy of Wim Wenders
When Wim Wenders first met Pope Francis before shooting the documentary “Pope Francis: A Man of his Word,” the pontiff warmly greeted the German filmmaker before warning Wenders that he is no movie buff.
“He said, ‘I’ve heard a lot about you, but you must know I don’t know much about cinema and I haven’t seen a single one of your films. Actually, I don’t know almost any movies,’” says Wenders.
Later, once the film was nearly completed, Wenders inquired if Pope Francis wanted to see it. The response came that, while the Pope was satisfied with the experience, he wouldn’t see the movie: “It’s just not my thing.”
And yet, in “A Man of His Word” Pope Francis becomes the first pontiff to participate in such a movie. The film premiered Sunday at the Cannes Film Festival, though the Pope, who was meeting this week in Rome with Chilean bishops to discuss Chile’s sex abuse crisis, was not in Cannes.
Focus Features released the film — an unprecedented bigscreen close-up for the Pope — Friday.
Wenders, the Oscar-winning filmmaker of “Wings of Desire” and “Buena Vista Social Club,” says he received “carte blanche” from the Vatican and final cut. He conducted four interviews spread out over four years, all inside Vatican walls, and was granted access to the Vatican’s video library.
The film, shot with Errol Morris’ “Interrotron” camera apparatus that allows a subject to speak directly into the camera, is essentially an intimate audience with Pope Francis as he ruminates on global challenges facing the world.
In between footage of Pope Francis visiting everywhere from a joint session of U.S. Congress to a Philadelphia prison, from an African children’s hospital to a Greek migrant camp, the spiritual leader discusses faith in the modern world, poverty, pollution, female equality, church sex scandals, migrants and economic inequality.
Pope Francis arrived for their first interview, Wenders says, unaccompanied and without a cell phone.
Wenders lets audiences see the world through the eyes of the Pope, whom he calls “a man who lives what he preaches.”
“You don’t really realize that whenever he travels, he’s also seeing prisons, hospitals, he’s seeing camps, he’s seeing slums. He goes to all these places it hurts to go,” said Wenders. “And nobody else on this planet does that. I don’t know of any other person who meets both heads of state and goes to see the prisoners. I don’t know that person.”