The Faith Project: A Classroom Discussion on Beliefs
2015 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Christopher Romeike
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, tender
Young Canadians from different religious and cultural backgrounds compare core beliefs. The classroom exchange explores where convictions converge and where they remain distinct.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a classroom roundtable, which sounds like the safest possible documentary format—but Romeike somehow makes the form itself the argument, letting contradiction breathe without resolving it, which feels almost radical in a landscape of reconciliation narratives.
This sits squarely in the essay-film tradition of pedagogical cinema, where the frame itself becomes an instrument of inquiry; the restraint and formal clarity place it alongside work that treats belief as a compositional problem, not a political one.
The real move here is the editing rhythm—those micro-pauses between responses, the decision to hold on faces mid-thought rather than cut to agreement—that single choice transforms a potential PSA into something genuinely uncertain and alive.