Maria is a 14-year old teenage girl, who is part of a fundamentalist Christian family in the Catholic community. Attending sunday school classes, Maria becomes a devout believer in god, constantly day dreaming of being one of his holy children in heaven. Living in the modern world, Marta struggles to balance her own desires with that of the gospel and her strict religious family. Dietrich Bruggemann's Stations of the Cross is a minimalistic indictment of fundamentalist faith, capturing the emotional damage that can be caused on impressionable young minds who simply want to appease god. Meticulously designed, Stations of the Corss is told in fourteen single shot compositions, with Maria's narrative running parallel to Jesus' own journey that ended in his cruxification. Stations of the Cross captures the danger of preaching 'fire and brimstone' to impressionable minds, with Maria making more and more dangerous sacrifices in an effort to appease the God she worships. Her mother is the main driver of this strict faith, chastizing her daughter for wanting to do even the simplest of things she views satantic, like joining a youth choir that sings jazz. We see the insane amount of internal pressure that is put on Maria, who never feels good enoug for her god, inevitably pushing herself further and further, shatering her own mental state in an attempt to appease her mother's strict guidelines. Maria constantly finds herself torn between her relationship with god and the world around her, forching this young woman to question her own "worthy-ness" with god. What makes Stations of the Cross so fascinating is that while it captures the inherent danger of blind faith it also seems to acknowledge miracles, or at least simply understand it cannot write off them off entirely. Using a static and rigour filmmaking style, Dietrich Bruggemann's Stations of the Cross matches the inflexibility of religion, being a cold, yet poignant study of radicalistic religion.
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June 2023
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