The Faith Project: A Classroom Discussion on Practicing Faith in a Secular World
2015 · 5m · Canada
Directed by Christopher Romeike
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, tender
Young practitioners consider what it means to live a faith openly inside a largely secular society. Their conversation weighs private devotion against public expression.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects a faith doc to either proselytize or debunk—Romeike's refusal to pick a side is almost too reasonable for its own good, but that restraint is exactly what makes the premise interesting instead of preachy.
The film's formal rigor lies in its patient framing of contradiction: five minutes of teenagers thinking aloud about devotion without resolving anything, structured like an essay that trusts the viewer to hold multiple truths at once—a lineage that traces back to the best of Vigo and Bresson.
The decision to let silences breathe between answers, and to shoot the speakers in that specific soft-focus intimacy rather than interrogation-room clarity, transforms what could've been a generic talking-heads piece into something genuinely vulnerable.