Saturday, April 15, 2017

Scorsese Screens Film, Participates in Faith and Culture Conversation

News Archive

This movie tells the story of two Christian missionaries
from Portugal, Fr. Sabastião Rodrigues
and Fr. Francisco Garrpe, who travel to Japan in 1640 amidst violent Christian
persecution in search of their mentor, who was rumored to have publicly denied
his faith years before. As his struggled journey progresses, Fr. Rodrigues
experiences the absolute silence of God—which Scorsese’s film is dedicated to
explaining—and forces Rodrigues to question his faith entirely in a nation that
outlawed Christianity for fear of losing its Japanese language, land, and
culture.

 

Passion Project

 
Scorsese first discovered Endo’s Silence while on a bullet train bound for Kyoto, Japan, in 1989. It
spoke to him, but years passed while he produced hits like Goodfellas, The Departed, and The
Wolf of Wall Street. But Silence was
the picture he really wanted to create. Finally, 26 years later, filming began.    “It’s an amazing
thing to be sitting here at my age and to have had this brewing in me for the
past twenty-some odd years. More than that, really, since I was 8 years old,”
Scorsese said.

 

 

Childhood Influence

 

Raised in an Italian family in New York, young Scorsese wanted
to be a missionary. He spent time near St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral there, where he
watched priests perform sacraments during Mass and witnessed the power of
transubstantiation. To him, the Church pointed to a vast, open world. Movies did
the same, and as a kid, his working-class parents often took him to see Italian
classics like Roberto Rossellini’s Rome,
Open City.

 “With cinema itself—the movies—Hollywood films and Italian
films, I was able to experience certain things that very often in the family we
didn’t talk about openly. The medium of the movies just happens to be the way I
ended up finding a way to express myself,” Scorsese said.

 
Knowing of Scorsese’ ...

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