God's Dominion - In the Name of the Father
1993 · 50m · Canada
Directed by Ted Remerowski
Genres: documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Toronto Archbishop Aloysius Ambrozic becomes a lightning rod for protest, exposing a Catholic Church split between demands for change and defence of the status quo. The film maps the rift in the name of the Father.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A 50-minute doc about ecclesiastical hand-wringing—fine craft, sure, but it's essentially a well-mannered argument about whether the Church should modernize, which is exactly the consensus position everyone already holds. The lightning rod metaphor promises electricity; the film delivers procedural restraint.
Remerowski constructs a formal inquiry into institutional schism with the rigor of a cinematic essay, letting the documentary form itself become the argument—the visual and structural choices map the theological and social fractures without editorializing. It's the kind of measured, architecturally aware work that situates itself within the lineage of engaged documentary practice.
The decision to let silence and spatial composition carry the weight of ideological conflict—rather than narrator guidance or talking-head rhetoric—is what lifts this from institutional portrait into something cinematically alive; Remerowski trusts the image to do the work.