Martin Scorsese documentary to bring ‘final dream' of Pope Francis to life
The film Aldeas – A New Story will delve into the educational movement Scholas Occurrentes, founded by Francis in 2013 as an organisation for school pupils to carry out projects.
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The pontiff died on Easter Monday aged 88, with the spiritual leader's funeral taking place on Saturday, and tributes remembered him as an advocate of climate change action and a more liberal Catholic Church.
Production company Aldeas Scholas Films, part of Scholas Occurrentes, called the movie a 'final dream of Pope Francis' and a 'powerful new documentary', and said it would feature conversations between Oscar-winning director Scorsese and the late pontiff.
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A statement added: 'Rooted in the Culture of Encounter, the film brings together diverse communities from around the world to tell their own stories, celebrate their identities, and preserve their cultural legacy through cinema.'
The production is in association with Scorsese's company Sikelia Productions and Massive Owl Productions, co-founded by Victoria Brooks who has worked on Downton Abbey and Peaky Blinders.
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Scorsese, 82, said: 'Now, more than ever, we need to talk to each other, listen to one another cross-culturally.
'One of the best ways to accomplish this is by sharing the stories of who we are, reflected from our personal lives and experiences.
'It helps us understand and value how each of us sees the world.
'It was important to Pope Francis for people across the globe to exchange ideas with respect while also preserving their cultural identity, and cinema is the best medium to do that.
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Scholas Occurrentes, with more than one million participants from around the world, is aimed at creating 'a global network of schools who work together to give young people a voice and to become active agents of change in their communities'.
Scorsese, who directed Goodfellas, Taxi Driver and The Wolf Of Wall Street, previously met Francis in September 2023 in an audience of public figures, and in 2016 after the screening of his film Silence, about Jesuit priests trying to spread Christianity in 17th century Japan.
The director is also behind the music documentaries George Harrison: Living In The Material World, Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, Beatles '64 and The Last Waltz.
Francis was not one to shy away from the limelight either, appearing in the Netflix series Stories Of A Generation, Leonardo DiCaprio's climate change documentary Before The Flood, and the 2018 film Pope Francis: A Man Of His Word.
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The National
an hour ago
- The National
John Purser on a very strange week in Monaco
For me it has been a joy. But I did encounter it at its very worst at a James Joyce Symposium, though I was there on account of Jack Yeats. Yeats. It's a name to conjure with. WB Yeats, Nobel Prize-winning poet, mystic (in Sligo he is still known as Spooky Willy), and latterly alarmingly right-wing, almost war-mongering. There are many hundreds of theses and academic articles about him and his work. It's great work but it just doesn't need that amount of attention. His brother, Jack, is held by many to be Ireland's greatest painter. He was a left-wing republican and is my favourite. Their sisters, Lily and Lolly, ran the influential Cuala printing press and publishing company and were also artists. READ MORE: Parents face £10k childcare bills as council blocks cross-authority funding And there was their father, John Butler Yeats, who was a fine portrait painter, a voluminous talker and letter-writer. and hopeless at bringing things to fruition. 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The tall windows looked out through their Gothic arches on to a quadrangle enclosed by soot-blackened sandstone walls tall enough to cut out much of the sky. 'It's very good, John. You've done a lot of work. Most interesting. But it lacks a proper conclusion.' 'Jack wasn't a man for conclusions.' 'Nevertheless, John, a conclusion is called for.' 'It wouldn't be right. I don't really think I need to add to what I've written.' 'You know John, when one writes a thesis one gathers the evidence and adduces the reasoning and one comes to a conclusion.' 'But that's not how Jack Yeats works. It's not a schoolboy essay, it's a reflection of his work as a whole. He thought and wrote by association.' 'Well John, a conclusion would be very useful.' By which I was emphatically given to understand that, without one, there would be no PhD. To be fair to Peter, he was perfectly satisfied with the conclusion when it arrived. It started with the words 'Conclusions are foolish things ...' 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The place must have seemed full of vultures plucking at the carcasses of his grandparents and, with a few fine exceptions, showing little feeling of love for the text (which text? – choose your weapons). In some cases Joyce was ignored altogether. One leading speaker, passionate for Virginia Woolf, succeeded in avoiding Joyce for more than an hour. A session chairman from Philadelphia spoke entirely about himself. A lady from Delaware spoke up for DH Lawrence and rubbished Joyce as a nature writer – but, thankfully, David Norris's brilliant rendering of a breaking Joycean wave caused her to withdraw with good humour. As for the Women's Caucus (Shirley Conran among them, no men admitted), they fell out among themselves and that was the sum total of their report. 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Arun Durvasula is a cartoonist who lives in Pasadena, California. His work has appeared in the American Bystander, the Weekly Humorist, Phi Delta Kappan and elsewhere. You can find him on Instagram at @
