Rehearsal
2021 · 15m · Nigeria
Directed by Michael Omonua
Genres: documentary, drama, satire
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, provocative
Nigerian Pentecostal worshippers rehearse staged miracle healings like actors rehearsing a play, blurring church, theatre, faith, and credibility.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Finally—a film that doesn't apologize for asking whether faith and performance are even separable, let alone whether the distinction matters. Omonua watches these healers rehearse their miracles with the same deadpan precision as a Brechtian actor studying blocking, and refuses to let you land on a comfortable moral position about any of it.
Rehearsal stakes its claim in a lineage of essay-documentary and performative anthropology—Wiseman, de Oliveira—yet Omonua's formal restraint (the static framing, the unhurried pacing) allows the theological and theatrical questions to coexist without resolution, which is precisely the rigor the form demands.
The crucial move is never cutting away from the moment the 'healed' person breaks character—that hesitation, that flicker of doubt—which does more to destabilize your certainty about what you're watching than any voice-over could manage on ten times the budget.