Unfolding Faith
2025 · 23m · Canada
Directed by Elyse Bouvier
Genres: documentary, essay film, family
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
A filmmaker who has left the Pentecostal faith of her upbringing reopens questions of belief and belonging with her devout mother and her father, a former pastor who is now an atheist.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The premise sounds like a reconciliation doc, but Bouvier's actually interrogating belief itself through three irreconcilable positions—that's messier and weirder than the elevator pitch suggests, which means it's probably doing something the consensus-builders will miss.
Bouvier positions her essay within the long lineage of intimate family documentaries that treat faith as a formal problem, not just an emotional one; the restraint in how she frames these three perspectives suggests a filmmaker aware of both structural tradition and her own necessary distance from it.
The filmmaking choice that matters here is almost certainly the decision to keep herself—the daughter, the filmmaker—present but not centered; that restraint, that refusal of easy catharsis, is what transforms a personal family conversation into something that actually holds.